The history of Community Interpreting studies in Japan

Abstract

The study of CI in Japan began in the late 1980s, and its first researchers were law professors and attorneys who advocated human rights. They discussed the plight of non-Japanese-speaking defendants in legal settings. Subsequently, interpreters and theorists of interpretation discussed ethics, cultural issues, training and so on. Recently, however, a new wave of studies has emerged, with a greater focus on linguistic approaches such as discourse analysis, corpus studies etc. This paper will first briefly review the earlier CI research in general and then focus on legal interpreting, which is the most advanced and noteworthy area of CI studies in Japan.