Brander de la Iglesia, María. “Motivation in Retour Interpreter Education: The Ethics of Care in the Teaching and Learning of Interpreting into B.” Retour Interpreting: The Art of Interpreting into B, editado por Riccardo Moratto e Irene A. Zhang, Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2025.

Abstract

Endeavours to normalise interpreting into B are crucial to the most vulnerable users of interpretation, including neglected groups such as indigenous peoples. This awakening to more caring viewpoints in translation and interpreting studies, understood both in the technofeminist sense and in the fostering of critical thought, mirrors the prism through which the ethics of care stirs long-neglected emotional aspects in sister fields of psychology, education, and technology. Awareness of values and beliefs that affect retour interpreting students’ motivational processes fosters conscious subjectivity, empathy, and empowerment, highlighting what recent studies on 4EA cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended + Affect) have to offer. This chapter explores directionality in interpreting from these belief systems’ perspective, while examining the equilibrium of cognitive efforts involved. Soft skills affect this, as do positive and negative motivational processes, with both motivation and education defined as processes, rather than products. Retour interpreting education juggles several equilibriums occurring simultaneously, and under time constraints. Intertwined in ways psychologists have only begun exploring, these factors make retour interpreter education a field demanding further study.