Interpreting for international organizations. Research, practice and training: Foreword

Professional interpreters are faced with the option of working as freelancers in the private market, or as staff interpreters in national or international institutions or a combination of the two, namely freelancers in international organizations.Each option reflects personal aspirations and needs, a lifestyle choice nurtured by a professional role that arouses admiration for the highly qualified skills required and for ensuring communication between human beings, but also concerns for the situations in which interpreters are nowadays expected to work ranging between in-process and peri-process challenging working conditions such as interpreting in multilingual settings where a lingua franca is used (or rather misused) and life-threatening risks such as interpreting in conflict zones. The foreword sets out the objective of the volume, i.e. providing an insight into the interpreting practice in international organizations from the perspective of those who work or have worked as professional interpreters. Furthermore, it describes the contributions which cover the whole trajectory of the prospective interpreter in this kind of interpreter-mediated communicative settings: from a training course in interpreting, through the challenges of selective entrance examinations, to the variety of high prestige multilingual institutions employing professional interpreters, mostly the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU).