A critical review of church interpreting research

Abstract

This article presents a critical review of literature on church interpreting, also called interpreting in church and sermon interpreting, and introduces the public Bibliography of Interpreting in Christian Settings. The review argues that this literature can be usefully organised into three separate approaches: publications aimed at practitioners, descriptive research, and prescriptive research. These approaches each presuppose a different relationship between interpreting and practice and between the researcher and the object of study and thus show distinct trajectories. Publications aimed at practitioners were developed as a tool for educating interpreters and later turned to empirical investigations. Descriptive research was developed from historical research on interpreting in Judaism and from two studies on the relationship between church interpreting and its contexts. Prescriptive research seeks to professionalise church interpreting, mostly through locating errors or challenges in interpreter output. This difference in research focus has led to a mix of methods and foci, from an autoethnography of interpreting to international surveys. It is argued that the separation of these approaches now impedes research progress. The article ends with a suggestion of how to synthesise these approaches, taking into account the social, spiritual, and personal nature of church interpreting.