Linking up with Video

This volume is intended as an innovating reader for both interpreting practitioners as well as scholars, engaging with the multifaceted question addressed in the title “Why linking up with video?”. The chapters in this volume deal with this question from different perspectives. On the one hand, the volume continues the ongoing discussion on the pros and cons of video-based interaction for the interpreting profession, exploring the implications and applications when interpreters and their clients link up through video technology. On the other hand, the chapters also explore the potential of video technology for research on interpreting, hence raising the question in which way high-quality video recordings of interpreters in the booth, participants involved in interpreter-mediated talk, etc. may be instrumental in gaining new insights. In this sense, the volume strongly ties in with the fast-growing field of multimodal (interaction) studies, which makes use of video recordings to study the relationship between verbal and nonverbal resources, such as gestures, postural orientation, gaze and head movements, in the construction of meaning in communication.

Annalisa Sandrelli, Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma - UNINT, in Journal of Pragmatics 176 (2021).:
Studies of this kind can provide much needed data on how interpreters manage turn-taking both verbally and non-verbally in face-to-face situations and, in turn, inform the on-going development of distance interpreting practices to overcome the current limitations of video-conferencing technology. Published in early 2020, the book has been made all the more relevant by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, which has made video-mediated communication an everyday occurrence for all of us, whether in monolingual or in interpreter-mediated multilingual settings.