Available at

1.2 CIS: a cottage industry 
Today, CIS is still considered “a cottage industry” (Setton, 2011: 34), which means 
that CIS is more “limited” (Bendazzoli, 2018: 2) compared to CTS research, 
especially due to small corpus size. However, corpus-based research in the field 
has been carried out quite a lot over the last twenty years. The volume of authentic 
conference interpretation recorded and/or transcribed and analysed since the 
beginnings of interpreting research is rather modest (Pöchhacker, 1994; Kalina, 
1998; Monacelli, 2005; Bendazzoli, 2010). Yet, many small samples have been 
collected and recorded in experimental conditions and many researchers have 
studied student productions which are much easier to obtain than professional 
interpretations (Ding et al., 2005). 
Recent developments, such as new software, access to larger and quality corpora, 
and new techniques for transcription and analysis enhance the data but the 
interpreting studies community still struggles to analyse and understand the 
practice of interpreting, because they only have primitive theoretical baggage at 
their disposal, which mainly consists of categories, assumptions and models which 

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Corpus-based interpreting studies 
 
page 13 
were inherited from descriptive linguistics and cognitive psychology (Setton
2011: 
33). Furthermore, interpreting research is mostly concerned with cognitive and 
psycholinguistic processes and it is really difficult to model the process if factors 
like live context or features of live speech, such as prosody, are not taken into 
consideration. 
Yet, research methods and doctrine have been a source of debate since the 
beginnings. On the one hand, the Paris school (Seleskovitch, 1975; Lederer, 1981; 
Donovan, 1990; Laplace, 1994 in Setton, 2011) insists on the fact that the only 
valid basis for research is the experience and observations of professionals. From 
the 1980s onwards, that doctrine was harshly challenged on methodological 
grounds and controlled experimental studies took the advantage over corpus-
intensive research. In the 1990s, CIS had a more sociological paradigm pursued 
by researchers based in Central Europe and Scandinavia (Pöchhacker, 1994; 
Kalina, 1998). As CIS was still focused on more controlled experimental studies, it 
was hard to obtain substantial authentic data. But since the 21
st
century and 
thanks to the availability of large multilingual datasets from the European 
Parliament and to the recent developments mentioned above, CIS is entering a 
new era.