SHIFT - Shaping the Interpreters of the Future and of Today

SHIFT in Orality is an Erasmus+ 3-year project funded by the European Commission in 2015, within Key Action 2: Strategic Partnership in Higher Education. As a result of globalization and of the continuous development and improvement of Information and Communication Technologies, language travels through new devices and media. Similar trends can be observed in the field of spoken-language interpreting where, alongside traditional onsite interpreting - where interpreters and speakers share the same space - remote interpreting is spreading through the use of telephone and videoconferencing. There is therefore a strong need to re-think and re-frame theoretical models of oral communication and interpreter-mediated communication as well as current approaches to interpreter training. Against this backdrop, the goal of SHIFT project is developing a comprehensive solution for training in remote interpreting in Higher Education and Lifelong Learning, through the cooperation of a European network of universities offering interpreting programmes and interpreting service providers. This solution will be based on a thorough study of orality in remote monolingual communication (English, Spanish, Italian) and remote, interpreter-mediated multilingual communication (for Italian<->Spanish, English<->Spanish, Italian<->English). A market analysis will also be carried out to gain an insight of the current and future demand for remote interpreting and understand educational implications. Since the demand for remote interpreting is growing, in particular in public service and business, and its main mode is dialogue interpreting, the project will focus on the teaching of remote dialogue interpreting