This chapter describes the nature of interpreting in military/diplomatic contexts at the
Italian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and it is particularly interested in the role played by
genre in this context. In terms of diplomacy-level military discourse, we offer an overview
of some important genres that are part of the job profile of MoD staff and freelance interpreters.
Specifically, we focus on the “hyper-genre” (Giltrow & Stein 2009) of Memorandum
of Understanding (MOU) and some related texts, genres and situations, which are
combined in various ways to form “genre chains” (Fairclough 2003). Our main hypothesis
is that MoD professionals are involved in genre-building and propagation. This hypothesis
is premised on the notion that genre and context awareness are crucial to interpreters’
success. On the basis of empirical data taken from semi-structured interviews with current
and former MoD Translators/Interpreters, we argue that interpreters in a militarydiplomatic
situation assume varying degrees of responsibilities in genre dissemination
and recontextualization (Boyd & Monacelli 2010).
