In recent years, interpreting has undergone a silent but profound transformation. What was once a firmly analog profession rooted in face-to-face communication has been increasingly shaped by digital tools, remote platforms, and — more recently — artificial intelligence. Back in 2018, I proposed the idea of a “technological turn” in interpreting, anticipating a period in which these forces would radically change how interpreting is delivered and consumed, a prediction now widely recognized across the field, as the timely publication of The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting, Technology and AI demonstrates.
This volume is the third edited collection to explore the intersection of interpreting and technology. The first, Interpreting and Technology (Fantinuoli, 2018), laid early groundwork by surveying emerging tools in remote, CAI, and virtual realities. The second, Interpreting Technologies – Current and Future Trends (Corpas Pastor & DeFrancq, 2023), expanded into a broader set of applied and pedagogical perspectives. The new Routledge Handbook of Interpreting, Technology and AI, by contrast, embraces a much broader scope, covering everything from education and policy to cognition, platforms, tools, and emerging AI interpreting, making it a critical repository for the field’s current moment.
This volume stands out for the breadth and ambition of its scope. Its release is timely; not because it breaks new ground conceptually, but because it consolidates a decade of fragmented research into a single, accessible resource. It reflects the maturation of a field that has moved from tentative experimentation to broad academic recognition, and it provides a much-needed map for navigating the complex, fast-changing technological terrain interpreters now operate in, and future ways multilingual communication will be consumed (AI Interpreting).
This aggregation of perspectives is perhaps the volume’s greatest strength. For students embarking on dissertation projects, it serves as a one-stop portal to analyze the state of the field. For professors designing syllabi, it offers structure and scope. And for seasoned researchers who have yet to engage with the digital wave — and there are many — it may serve as a wake-up call.
Importantly, the book has the merit of not limiting itself to stricto sensu technology. It engages with broader themes that shape the technological landscape, such as the specificities of interpreting in special settings (with contributions for example on legal contexts by Devaux), ethical challenges (Giustino), and cognitive implications (Mellinger). This breadth makes the volume particularly valuable not just for interpreters, but for anyone seeking to understand how technology intersects with practice, policy, and pedagogy.
No handbook is without its caveats, and this one is no exception. The first is repetition. With 26 authors working independently, certain themes — particularly those related to remote and hybrid interpreting — are revisited multiple times, to the point of over-familiarity. Such repetition often reflects a lack of thematic cohesion. This unevenness suggests that the editorial plan prioritized authorial freedom and individual priorities over a clearly defined structure established from the outset, an approach that, while fostering autonomy, comes at the cost of overall consistency. In other words, the handbook adapts to its contributors rather than the contributors adapting to a unified editorial vision, a trade-off that offers diversity and richness, but at the expense of narrative clarity. Still, it is precisely this diversity that lends the volume its value, capturing the field’s real-world complexity and multiplicity of perspectives.
Furthermore, some chapters venture into territory that could be described as academically well-supported but practically obsolete, addressing topics that made little impact when first introduced and have since faded into academic obscurity. Their inclusion may stem from a desire for completeness, but it also underscores the limited scope of genuinely “live” topics currently shaping the field. In some cases, these contributions come across as filler, serving more to expand the handbook’s breadth than to enhance its practical or conceptual relevance.
Lastly, it misses many topics that are of interest for interpreting at large, such as systems for managing demand and offer, platform for self-study (especially AI driven), just to name a few. The topics are dictated by what the community of researchers have worked on until now, and miss some tentative look into the future, or simply a better alignment with what the industry is working on right now. Might such topics – my wish – become object of scrutiny and innovation in the future.
Without describing the individual chapters and their specific merits, I would like to conclude by offering two high-level reflections that caught my attention on the state-of the discipline from reading the book.
Firstly, out of 22 chapters, only one is devoted to automation, the very area with the greatest potential to upend the interpreting ecosystem. That imbalance reflects what Pym has critiqued as the profession’s reactive stance toward technology: embracing what is already visible, while tiptoeing around what is truly disruptive. More fundamentally, this tendency reflects a deeper issue: Interpreting Studies has yet to fully recognize the role it could — and arguably should — play in critically engaging with the transformative developments unfolding in the field, particularly in relation to automaton technology.
Secondly, the legacy divisions within interpreting studies still shape how technological change is addressed. Interpreting has long been ghettoized into separate silos, most notably the enduring split between conference interpreting and all other forms (community, healthcare, legal, etc.), and this is evident also in this handbook. Authors tend to focus either on how a given technology affects conference settings or community contexts, rarely both1. This fragmentation continue to miss the point: most technologies — from CAI tools to speech recognition — are modality-agnostic. Over-specialization is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive. A more holistic view would help unify the field, encourage interdisciplinary thinking, and better reflect the increasingly hybrid and overlapping nature of real-world interpreting practice. In an age demanding adaptability and systems thinking, interpreting studies can no longer afford internal borders that no longer exist in practice.
Despite its limitations, The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting and Technology marks a significant step forward. For scholars, students, and industry professionals alike, the volume functions not just as a resource, but as a reflective surface, teaching us where we are and guiding us toward where we might go.
As someone who contributed to the chapter on machine interpreting, I speak with both personal investment and professional conviction: interpreting is far from immune to disruption, but our best response is understanding, not denial. This handbook helps us begin that journey.
- Funny enough several chapters begin by acknowledging that the topic affects all form of interpreting, but they will only focus (again) on conference interpreting. ↩︎