Interpreting and technology: Is the sky really the limit?

Abstract

Nowadays there is a pressing need to develop interpreting-related technologies, with practitioners and other end-users increasingly calling for tools tailored to their needs and their new interpreting scenarios. But, at the same time, interpreting as a human activity has resisted complete automation for various reasons, such as fear, unawareness, communication complexities, lack of dedicated tools, etc. Several computer-assisted interpreting tools and resources for interpreters have been developed, although they are rather modest in terms of the support they provide. In the same vein, and despite the pressing need to aiding in multilingual mediation, machine interpreting is still under development, with the exception of a few success stories. This paper will present the results of VIP, a R&D project on language technologies applied to interpreting. It is the ‘seed’ of a family of projects on interpreting technologies which are currently being developed or have just been completed at the Research Institute of Multilingual Language Technologies (IUITLM), University of Malaga.