Earticle

With a dramatic decrease in the number of face-to-face interactions, the COVID-19 pandemic has immensely affected the interpreting community; however, distance interpreting executed on various online platforms has emerged as a way to circumvent the difficulties in providing language services between parties around the world. Distance interpreting (DI), delivering interpreting services from a distant site, with the interpreters receiving both audio and visual input displayed on screens, presents some cognitive, emotional, technical, and physical difficulties to interpreters due to many reasons including a lack of social “presence” in remote interactions, the lack of visual perception of the conference hall, bad sound and image quality, and difficulties in handling technical devices. This case study investigates the limitations of DI and ways to overcome them based on the literature review and surveys conducted by the Korean Association of Translators and Interpreters (KATI) of 23 professional interpreters who have performed remote simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. Their answers to the survey were used in creating a checklist to guarantee professional-level performance during the DI session.