“Challenged, but in a positive way”: The experience of a multilingual summer school of remote dialogue interpreting

Remote dialogue interpreting, via both telephone and videoconference, is rapidly becoming a standard procedure in the provision of language services for the business, social, health and administrative sectors. This calls for a revision of interpreter training practice in order to include remote interpreting abilities in the curriculum. This was the primary goal of the SHIFT in Orality Erasmus+ project, funded by the European Commission, which aimed at producing a comprehensive and research-based training solution on remote interpreting. The training materials produced within the project were tested for the first time during a multilingual summer school organised in June 2018 within the framework of the project with students from the four SHIFT partner Universities (University of Bologna, Italy; University of Granada, Spain; Pablo de Olavide University of Seville, Spain; University of Surrey, UK), and trainers from the same universities and the two remote interpreting companies in the partnership, Dualia SL (Spain) and VEASYT Srl (Italy). In this paper, the design of the summer school, the infrastructure used and the technological tools employed will be described, as well as the activities carried out with the students. The main results of the evaluation questionnaires and focus groups will also be presented.