Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).

The final chapter explores the relevance of this grammar of Korean to two particular contexts of application (i) teaching Korean as a foreign language and (ii) translation and interpreting (T&I). It begins with a discussion of traditional approaches to teaching Korean as a foreign language and then illustrates the way the grammar can be drawn on to inform a pedagogic practice based on Reading to Learn (R2L) – focusing on locative relational clauses. The chapter then turns to relevance of the grammar to the field of translation and interpreting, beginning with an interpretation example and moving on to a translation example. The chapter concludes with a brief note on additional fields of application.

Working memory, as a cognitive function, needs to be understood within the context of the mind as a whole, in other words within a general framework that can connect it to related research and theory. In this chapter we present one such broad view of the mind, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), and apply it to the study of working memory, emphasizing its involvement in language development and use. We consider the nature of working memory as an integral part of the cognitive system, along with working memory capacity, offering a relatively fine-grained, cognitively contextualized account of what working memory is and where the capacity limits come from. This approach provides a means of understanding and further studying a range of phenomena, including the nature and use of metalinguistic knowledge, bilingual language “selection”, code-switching, switch costs and their absence, crosslinguistic influence, optionality in second language learning, and translation and interpreting.