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Ongoing discussion continues to debate the role interpreters should embrace, whether the interpreter should be an impartial agent or whether impartiality can be demanded from a human agent at all. The current discussion favours the idea that roles are negotiated through interaction and that the ideal of impartiality may be compromised in specific situations or settings. This negotiation, far from constituting an academic discussion, is determined by the parties to the communicative situation. It is therefore relevant to be able to assess interpreters’ and users’ views as to what a particular situation requires of the interpreter. Based on a content analysis of the existing literature on the interpreter’s role, we developed a model to account for opposing perceptions of what interpreters are and should do in their professional practice, and represent those views as possibilities on a continuum rather than as opposing and excluding options. This paper presents a tool based on that model which allows perceptions to be made explicit and discussed. The model and preliminary experiences of the application of the tool in interpreting teaching and in one professional context are presented.

This article aims at presenting the reader with a didactic proposal for training higher education interpreting students in entrepreneurial skills by means of introducing a toolkit based on the Blue Ocean Strategy marketing theory. First, the reasons why entrepreneurship is necessary and should thus be an integral part of the interpreting curriculum will be put forward. Second, the Blue Ocean Strategy and its special suitability for the interpreting market will be argued. Third, the transposition of this theory into the interpreting classroom will be explained, with a focus on the approach and development of the lesson plan and didactic materials, which were devised on the basis of a flipped learning teaching methodology. Fourth, the results of the pilot implementation of this toolkit in the dialogue interpreting course Interpretación II: Técnicas de mediación intercultural, a 6 ECTS B.A. in Translation and Interpreting course at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas (Madrid), will be discussed by way of analysing 45 responses to questionnaires designed with the purpose of shedding light on whether perceptions of the interpreting market substantially differ among students who made part of the experimental group that took the Blue Ocean Strategy pilot class (18 subjects) and the control group (27 subjects), who did not receive training in this marketing strategy.