In my talk I will recount the history of fieldwork methods in translation studies, discussing the varied driving forces and competing paradigms behind their rise from the early 2000s onwards and identifying some current trends. I will then move on to discuss some future directions where I see new potential. These include translatorial linguistic ethnography, creative fieldwork methods and citizen science approaches. 

The term linguistic ethnography is an umbrella term for “a growing body of research by scholars who combine linguistic and ethnographic approaches in order to understand how social and communicative processes operate in a range of settings and contexts” (Shaw, Copland & Snell, 2015). The core goal of linguistic ethnography is to examine language use in context, so by that very definition, various qualitative research conducted within Interpreting Studies could be considered as falling under this umbrella. First, I will give an overview of linguistic ethnography and how it can be used to examine interpreter-mediated interactions, and will highlight existing interpreting research that could be considered within this framework. I will give examples from my own current research examining experiences of professional and non-professional interpreter-mediated communication within a linguistic ethnographic framework; and I will also propose the affordances of examining interpreter-mediated communication through the theoretical lens of translanguaging, which is widely used by linguistic ethnographers to examine direct communication. Finally, I will explore how re-framing our approach to interpreting studies through linguistic ethnography may also lead to a re-framing of what we mean by mediated communication.