Public Service Interpreter’s Identity Management and Identity Crisis

This book offers the first comprehensive theoretical and empirical study of public service interpreting as fundamental identity work.

It develops the Symbolic Interactionist Model of Interpreter’s Identity Management, situating interpreters’ agency, ethical decision-making and professional practice within individual, interactional, institutional and societal processes. The framework is grounded in an original study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and unstructured interviews with nineteen experienced interpreters. Their accounts illuminate identity conflict, moral distress, vicarious trauma and the destabilising effects of outsourcing on professional recognition. The book concludes with policy and professional recommendations addressing regulation, procurement, remuneration, and institutional accountability, including statutory protection of the professional title. It also examines artificial intelligence as a double-edged force that risks intensifying the commodification of interpreting expertise while offering an opportunity to redefine professional value around ethical judgement and intercultural mediation. The book will be valuable to researchers and postgraduate students in interpreting and translation studies, language policy, identity research, the sociology of professions, as well as practitioners, professional bodies, policymakers and public-service organisations. It provides a theoretically informed framework for understanding the consequences of outsourcing and technological change.

It also offers practical insights into professionalisation, interpreter wellbeing and the protection of equal language access to public services.