ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the commonalities and differences between spoken language conference and community interpreting. The aim is to describe the common core of these two fields of activity, often treated as two different professions. The chapter starts by describing what is argued are common core concepts of interpreting, namely, monologic/monologue vs dialogic/dialogue, setting, mode and modality. Then conference and community interpreting are compared from the perspectives of profile, skills, training, directionality, users, working conditions, professionalization, and research. Reasons for the two fields of activity being conceptualized as two different professions are discussed. Possible reasons identified include organization, setting and placement, remuneration, status of users, and levels of education. However, since the core concepts, competencies and knowledge are the same or very similar, and since a professional interpreter can be, and many are, active in both conference and community interpreting, it is argued that it may be more fruitful to consider them as fields of activity rather than different professions.
