Since the publication of Mason’s Dialogue Interpreting (1999), DI research has come to cover many types of real-life interpreter-mediated encounters in public and private settings, including some that would hardly fall within Public Service Interpreting (PSI), such as talk shows and business negotiations. For almost 20 years, particular attention has been paid to the development of rigorous research methods in DI/PSI, increasingly based on empirical data, be they recordings of interaction, interviews or questionnaires. Reflection on appropriate research design focuses on either general characteristics of DI/PSI (Monzó-Nebot/Wallace 2020), or on those occurring in specific settings (Biel et al. 2019), such as legal, healthcare, including mental health, immigration and asylum. Researchers explore a wide range of topics, from specific contexts and cognitive processes at work, to particular phenomena, such as manifestations of affiliation between the care provider and the interpreter (Ticca/Traverso 2017), or the influence of the interpreter on interpersonal relationships (Goguikian Ratcliff/Pereira 2019). There is also a strong interest in face-to-face vs. remote interpreting and on spoken vs. signed languages, as well as on systematic data collection and transcription for fine-grained analysis and international dissemination (e.g. Meyer 2019). DI/PSI scholars can now count on increasingly larger sets of authentic data in different professional settings and language combinations. Some of them use multimodal analysis (Davitti/Pasquandrea 2017) or triangulate theories, data sets and analytical tools (Aguilar Solano 2020) to get a broader and richer picture of the phenomenon under investigation and increase the trustworthiness of the results. In short, the reflection on research methodology in DI/PSI is dynamic and innovative (Valero-Garcés 2020), with an increasing impact on interpreters’ and service providers’ training (Cirillo/Niemants 2017).

Against this backdrop, Issue 26 of The Interpreters’ Newsletter sets out to explore some specific DI/PSI contexts and phenomena through specific analytical lenses. It welcomes innovative contributions either in types of data or settings/communicative situations, or in the methods (or combinations of methods) of analysis proposed, or in their applications to both personnel training and academic teaching and learning. Contributors are thus invited to feed the discussion on various innovative methodological approaches which, from an inter/transdisciplinary perspective and on the basis of authentic data, can shed light on practices and phenomena that have so far received scant attention in the DI/PSI literature, and/or which have never reached the classroom yet.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following areas related to DI:

 Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods

 Multimodal analysis

 Transcription and Query tools

 Authentic data access, interoperability and sharing

 Specific communicative contexts and phenomena

 Training applications

 Intercultural communication

Deadline for submissions; 15 March 2021

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