Teachers’ professional development has received wide attention in language education and yielded fruitful results in the past five decades, yet a special teacher group, namely, university interpreting trainers’ professional development seemed to be largely absent in the literature. Compared with their counterparts who engage in language teaching only, this group of teachers often faces more challenges because interpreting training involves trainers’ own professional practices while most members of this teacher group were language teachers newly transferred to the new role as interpreting trainers. To what extent these teachers perceive their professional development and what factors constrain or facilitate their professional development are worth of investigation. The present paper used narrative as a main research method, together with participants’ journals, classroom observations and students interviews, to explore two interpreting trainers’ professional development trajectories. Following principles of qualitative research data collection and analysis, the study revealed that participants’ different perceptions of professional identity, being an interpreter or university language teacher, served as a driving force that explained their professional development process; however, their decision-making was a dynamic and complex process that was often mingled with their immediate institutional decisions. Moreover, their respective choice brought with them different types of pressure: research and promotion pressure for the professional interpreter approach, and classroom teaching effect, embarrassing status in the interpreting trainer community and concerns on research interests etc. for the professional university language teacher approach. The study is limited in its nature of being small-scale and calls for future research to validate findings.
 

qualitative inquiry, interpreting trainer, professional development