Garzone, G. and M. Viezzi (Eds.) (2002): Interpreting in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 335 p.

In the world of the 21st century, it is said that the only constant is change: change that not only touches the minute facets of our daily lives, but change that also manifests itself in all arenas of academics, professions and training. The 1^st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies focused on changes that the World of Interpreting – encompassing research, the profession and training – faces in the 21^st century. While looking back upon past developments, participants to this Conference sought to take stock of changes that have taken place, and also provide an outlook for what the future will hold and expect from the inhabitants and observers of this World. At the very beginning, the editors provide a brief introduction to the Conference, followed by a comprehensive survey of the papers in this volume. The papers are divided into three groups: Focus on research, Interpreting outside the conference hall, and Interpreter training. To wrap up, a summary of the closing panel session is included at the end. Alessandra Riccardi’s paper is the first to be introduced in the “Focus on research” group. In this paper, Riccardi provides an overview of academic fields that have thus far influenced interpreting studies, and then provides brief accounts of research carried out on Interpreted Texts (ITs), which suggest that the distinctive nature of ITs require new approaches in research on interpreting as a whole. Riccardi then outlines a descriptive sheet for IT and, before concluding, briefly mentions studies that have been carried out on quality and interpreting strategies. Robin Setton and the team of Marco Cencini and Guy Aston have each contributed concrete ideas on research based on corpora. Setton proposes the use of corpus analysis in the task of examining interpretation processes, and sets forth ideas on how a corpus should be built, what the level of representation should be and how such corpora could be utilized in interpreting studies. Cencini and Aston, stressing the need to make interpreting data accessible to the public, look into building corpora composed of data that is easily interchangeable. In this context, their paper provides information on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and supplies readers with samples of encoding carried out according to TEI guidelines. Gun-Viol Vik-Tuovinen and Peter Mead, in their respective papers, both examine retrospection as a viable tool for interpreting research. Both papers are based on empirical studies carried out by the authors. Vik-Tuovinen looks at what the distinguishing features are between experienced and inexperienced interpreters, using quantitative and qualitative data collected through retrospection on simultaneous interpretation performances. One of the findings that could be quite relevant in the classroom was that professionals, even during simulated experiments, performed as if they were in front of a real-life audience. In Peter Mead’s paper, we are introduced to a study on pauses in the consecutive mode. Retrospection is used to gain insight on the interpreters’ perspective of why pauses occur in consecutive interpretation. In this study of interpreters of different levels and of A and B languages, it is noted that fluency ultimately depends on both linguistic and non-linguistic capabilities. Again, more food for thought for the training of interpreters. The next paper by Laura Salmon Kovarski surveys the various problems that Russian names, acronyms and allocutives pose to interpreters, and calls for interpreters to build “cross-cultural competence” (p. 86) and awareness of “the Skopos and the communicative situation” (p. 86) – yet more additional considerations for our classrooms. The three papers that follow all have to do with the issue of quality. Franz Pöchhacker first provides models on the concepts of ‘interpreting’ …