Abstract

For professionals or students of language curious about what we know about interpreting, it is useful to be aware of how research on this phenomenon has evolved. For one thing, interpreting studies as a field of scientific endeavour is relatively young, so that some of its early works continue to shape the field today. At the same time, research on interpreting has been undertaken from various scholarly vantage points, using concepts and methods from a variety of different disciplines, or paradigms. Understanding the research output and state of the art therefore requires some acquaintance with the field’s diverse developmental perspectives over the past half century. The present chapter will review the various stages and strands in the evolution of research on interpreting, giving special attention to early developments as well as the theoretical, methodological and thematic orientations underlying the state of the art in the first decades of the twenty-first century.