Crossing the divide: What researchers and practitioners can learn from one another

In this paper, I will claim that if it is to be meaningful, the interface between research and practice must draw upon the intuitions that practitioners bring with them into the research setting, on the one hand, and upon the methods of rigorous scientific inquiry, on the other. The paper describes ways in which this interface has evolved in the area of Interpreting Studies, as reflected in the past ten issues (2004-2008) of the journal Interpreting. Discussion of this interface is not new, of course, but the inter-relationship between the academic investigation of interpreting and the practitioner's experiences merits being reviewed periodically, in light of new developments, both in Interpreting Studies and in the practice of interpreting. The paper includes an overview of this inter-relationship, based on a corpus comprising ten issues of the journal.