Introduction

Abstract

The global spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has obvious repercussions on the practices of translation and interpreting.While international interactions in the twentieth century were predominantly facilitated by means of translation and interpreting practices, the twenty-first century is marked by an overwhelming use of ELF as a global means of communication in ever more such interactions. The main challenge seems to be not, as far as we can see, that interpreters and translatorswill soon bemade redundant, but rather that the number of source texts and source speeches produced in ELF is growing exponentially and that the consequences of this growth for the profession of translators and interpreters are to date largely unknown.While ELF use and its impact have beenwidely discussed in applied linguistics and pragmatics generally, its importance for translation and interpreting has not received the same attention. In order to get at the heart of the impact which ELF might have on translation and interpreting, we need to first take a closer look at the phenomenon of ELF so as to identify just what it is that makes ELF so potentially influential or even precarious for translation and interpreting. Themost important characteristic of ELF is its great variability and functional flexibility. The consequence of this is that there can be no established norm, and also no generally valid conventional rules seem to be available. Rather ELF is a kind of open source phenomenon – a resource for speakers of other languages to take advantage of the English language, on which ELF is, of course, basedbut fromwhich itmore often than not diverges due to users’ maintaining and blending features from their other languages (Cogo and House 2018; Firth 2009). ELF thus typically contains elements and structures from many different linguacultures, most often those from ELF users’mother tongues (House 2016). Cross-linguistic transfer is, in fact, among the most common features giving rise to comprehension difficulties in translation and interpreting (Albl-Mikasa 2018). ELF as a vehicular language is always negotiated ad hoc thus varying according to context and its users’ proficiency and communicative purpose, i. e. ELF use is individually shaped by its users – a condition that is critically different from