Franz Pöchhacker is Professor of Interpreting Studies in the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna.

He was trained as a conference interpreter (A: German, B: English, C: Spanish) at the University of Vienna, Austria (1982-1987) and at the Monterey Institute of Inter­national Studies, USA (1987-1988) and worked freelance as a conference and media interpreter for Austrian television for some 30 years.

Since 1989 he has held a full-time research and teaching position in the area of translation and interpreting at the University of Vienna. Following his doctoral dissertation on simultaneous conference inter­preting (Simultan­dol­metschen als komplexes Handeln; Gunter Narr 1994), he devoted his post-doctoral research to general issues of Interpreting Studies as a discipline and to empirical work on community interpreting in healthcare and social service settings (Dolmetschen. Konzeptuelle Grundlagen und deskriptive Unter­suchungen; Stauffenburg 2000).

He served for two terms of office as Secretary General of the European Society for Translation Studies (1993-1998), held visiting professorships at the University of Graz and at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China, and was CETRA Chair Professor in the 24th Research Summer School in Translation Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2012.

He has lectured widely, published more than 100 papers and reviews, and (co-)edited a number of books, including The Interpreting Studies Reader (Rout­ledge 2002) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (Routledge 2015). His textbook Introducing Inter­preting Studies (Routledge 2004; 3rd edition 2022) has been translated into several languages. He is co-editor of Inter­preting: International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting (John Benjamins) and Associate Editor of the “Benjamins Trans­lation Library” series. He also co-edits the German book series “Trans­lations­­wissen­schaft” (Gunter Narr) and serves on the editorial advisory boards of several journals.