I almost didn’t write this article.
When I received a last-minute invitation to contribute an essay on training and technology in interpreting, my first instinct was to hesitate. The debate around this topic has become somewhat circular — the same positions, the same arguments — and I wasn’t sure I had anything new to add.
What changed my mind was realising I maybe did have something to say, even if not something radically new. I had already shared these ideas in keynote talks and occasionally on this blog. What I hadn’t done was put them into print. So I accepted, and wrote the piece.
The argument at its core is simple: in a more technological world, academic training should not become narrower. It should become broader.
The trap of hyperspecialisation
One of the most common responses to technological change in higher education has been to accelerate along the path of hyperspecialisation: designing curricula around the short-term needs of the market. In practice, this means ever-narrower courses, ever-more-specific professional profiles, endless subdivision of expertise.
The intention is good: make students more employable, align training with what the industry needs right now. But it is a fragile strategy. The more automated the world becomes, the more short-term professional skills are exposed to substitution. The how of many tasks — translating a sentence, transcribing speech, retrieving terminology, processing multilingual content at scale — is precisely what machines are beginning to absorb. A curriculum built around those hows is a curriculum built on sand.
What universities are actually for
This is not an argument against professional relevance or technology. Both matter enormously. But the role of higher education cannot be reduced to teaching the latest tool or workflow. Or at least this hsould not their primary goal.
The real task is to help students understand not only how to do something, but why it matters, how it connects to other forms of knowledge, and how it is likely to change. We need graduates who can move between linguistic, cultural, technological, ethical, and institutional knowledge, people equipped not just for the profession as it exists today, but for a landscape that will look quite different a decade into their careers.
Broader, not more fragmented
My answer to technological acceleration is a more holistic education and not more fragmentation. Not less technology, but more critical distance from it. Not less practical training, but training embedded in broader intellectual and ethical frameworks. Interpreting education, in particular, should resist becoming merely a training ground for the last mile of technological application. That last mile changes fastest. What endures is the ability to understand, evaluate, adapt, and connect.
In a world where machines increasingly learn the how, universities should have the courage to teach the why.
The full paper is available here: https://revistas.uma.es/index.php/redit/es/article/view/24037/23900
Fantinuoli, C. “Reflections on technology and interpreter training”, Revista Electrónica de Didáctica de la Traducción y la Interpretación, 20, 2026, DOI: https://doi.org/10.24310/redit202026