Vasilenko The Department of Foreign Languages of Law Faculty Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia 6, Miklukho-Maklaya st., Moscow, Russia, 117198 The article focuses on identification and examining the factors that allow to consider court interpreting as an independent profession. <...> The article also highlights the specificity of court interpreting as a professional activity in legal settings. <...> Key words: court interpreting, professionalization, protection of human rights, communication in legal settings, standards of practice, professional organizations. <...> Professionalization is one of the most topical issues relating to Court interpreting as lack of the necessary level of professionalization and translation norms, generates confusion about standards of quality expectations on the client’s part and results in inferior position of interpreter in contrast to communicants invested with power (Court personnel as representatives of social institution). <...> Profession can be defined in various ways in academic studies. <...> We find the definition given by T. Brante the most appropriate: Professions are non-manual full-time occupations which presuppose a long specialized and tendentiously scholarly training which imparts specific, generalizable and theoretical professional knowledge, often proven by examination [2]. <...> Researches, investigating matters of professionalization, have attempted to developed different lists of specific features that characterize professions. <...> One ofsuch most successful attempts include the following items: “1) theoretical knowledge; 2) autonomy; 3) service mission; 4) ethical code; 5) public sanction (that is legal restriction on who can practice); 6) professional association; 7) formal training; 8) credentialing; 9) sense of community; 10) singular occupation choice (practitioners remain in the same occupation throughout their careers)” [9]. <...> Recognizing court interpreting as a specific profession, we shall refer to the following standards identified by Witter-Merithew [17]. <...> They are to be met in order to qualify an occupation as a full-fledged profession: A profession is an established field of expertise governed by standards of performance and behavior to which practitioners comply; A profession is a field of expertise that consists of a body of knowledge and skills that require academic pursuit to master; A profession has a mechanism for testing and determining who is qualified to function as a practitioner <...>