Community interpreters versus intercultural mediators (original) (raw)
Related papers
Community Interpreters versus Intercultural Mediators: Is it really all about ethics?
Translation and Interpreting Studies 15 (1), 2020
This article compares the professional profile of community interpreters to that of a particular group of intercultural mediators who work as nonprofessional, untrained interpreters, mainly in healthcare settings. Through a textual comparison of 13 deontological documents for community interpreters and intercultural mediators, this article investigates differences in the ethical positioning of these two profiles. The results show that while the codes of ethics of community interpreters tend to emphasize impartiality, the documents defining the emerging profile of intercultural mediators position advocacy more prominently. Beyond the differences in ethical positioning, the article also considers other reasons for the formation of this new profile and outlines several challenges related to the partial overlap between the two profiles, which include distorted definitions of the interpreter's competences and performance, conceptual confusion in the research literature, and mismatched expectations of language services consumers.
European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2016
A debate that has revolved around the organisation of Italian healthcare interpreting services concerns the choice adopted by most institutions to employ intercultural mediators rather than professional interpreters. Intercultural mediators do not necessarily have a professional training in interpreting, they are, however, preferred to professional interpreters in that they are considered more competent in mediating the possibly different perspectives of healthcare providers and migrant patients. This preference provides food for thought for reflections on professionalism in interpreter-mediated interaction in healthcare. Drawing form a 10-year research on mediator-interpreted interactions in healthcare and a set of data comprising around 250 consultations, our contribution sets out as an attempt to clarify what is involved in this mediating work. Our analysis shows that mediators’ agency is relevant both in providing renditions of participants’ utterances and in promoting their act...
Interpreters and Cultural Mediators – different but complementary roles
This article considers the roles of medical interpreters and cultural mediators and proposes that the two should be seen as separate. In the last six years cultural mediators have been trained in Ireland not to be interpreters but to help immigrants from other countries to access and use healthcare services as well as mediating in situations of conflict between health service providers and patients. Meanwhile, interpreters have been hired to bridge the language gap. Codes of ethics for medical interpreters and competencies of cultural mediators are considered in order to clarify role boundaries and to explore similarities and differences between the two roles.
Role(s) of a community interpreter versus professional standards and ethics
Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Warsaw, 2010
The aim of the present thesis is to outline the community interpreter's roles in a variety of settings, particularly in asylum and refugee hearings. It is also intended to juxtapose the interpreter's actual performance with the provisions of professional standards and codes of ethics addressed to community interpreters. It is commonly believed by users of community interpreting that the interpreter should remain „invisible“ and should not excessively engage in interpreted communication between representatives of diverse cultures and social groups speaking different languages. His/her role is usually defined in terms of a „faithful“ translation of a source language utterance into the target language, i.e. „just translating“. At the same time, he/she is typically required to stay impartial and neutral by distancing himself from the contents of interpreted verbal exchanges and the primary interlocutors' behaviour. It also frequently happens that, when defining their own role, interpreters themselves refer to misconceptions which depict them as emotionally detached „translating machines“. This image of the community interpreter is further reinforced by the existing professional standards and codes of ethics aimed at practitioners of interpreting. This thesis accentuates the complexity of the community interpreter's role and underlines the non-feasibility of describing him/her as an „invisible“, „transparent“ or a „neutral“ person. In addition, it discards the myth according to which he/she is capable of interpreting faithfully each and every utterance, without introducing any changes to its form. In face of the great number of contexts in which community interpreters operate, developing uniform codes of conduct remains unrealistic and the existing role prescriptions, on the other hand, can hardly find application in real-life communicative encounters. As a result, community interpreters face ethical dilemmas since the normative role prescriptions they know strictly prohibit acting as a cultural mediator or one of the primary interlocutors' assistant, roles which they are frequently found to perform. In this situation it is also impossible to properly delimit the interpreter's role even in cases his/her involvement in interpreted interaction is objectively too extensive. The present thesis discusses in more detail all of the abovementioned issues relating to the community interpreter‟s role and presents potential solutions to the problems identified. The first chapter chronologically presents accounts of the community interpreter's performance developed within various disciplines, i.e. linguistics, medical sciences, social sciences and interpreting studies, and emphasizes his/her active and multi-faceted role in intercultural communication. At the same time, theoretical models and approaches employed to describe the interpreter's role and his/her performance, stemming chiefly from the field of sociology, linguistics and sociolinguistics, are enumerated. Some room is also given to the origin of the invisibility/neutrality myth which is perceived by the author to hamper understanding of the nature of community interpreting as well as the community interpreter's role. The accounts of the interpreter's actions referred to in the first chapter clearly prove that presenting him/her as a “translating machine” is highly unjustified. The second chapter juxtaposes the provisions of professional standards and codes of ethics with the interpreter's actual performance in the refugee and asylum context. This juxtaposition is intended to reveal the deficiencies of the interpreter's normative role prescriptions and draw the reader's attention to the fact that they reinforce certain misconceptions and myths concerning community interpreters on the part of individuals and institutions using interpreting services. These misconceptions and myths, in turn, hinder smooth cooperation between interpreters and representatives of other professions. Considering the deficiencies of the existing codes of conduct, chapter two postulates altering their provisions and suggests implementing professional development courses for interpreters and public institutions' employees as a means of facilitating their joint performance. The third chapter presents an analysis of the interpreter‟s performance in refugee hearings held in the Office for Foreigners in Warsaw. The analysis is based on the accounts of the interpreter‟s actions provided by the Office‟s employees. Its main aim is to verify whether interpreters in the Office ignore the principle of “invisibility” and faithfulness of interpretation in order to facilitate communication between participants of refugee hearings. In addition, the research is designed to identify any potential factors that could prevent interpreters from complying with such specified interpreting principles. Moreover, it was the author‟s intention to establish the extent to which the perceptions of the interpreter's role on the part of the officers are conditioned by stereotypes concerning community interpreting and to juxtapose the immigration officers' understanding of the interpreter's role with their expectations of him/her. The empirical part of the present thesis enabled the author to draw conclusions concerning the interpreter‟s profile and his/her role in refugee hearings held in the Officer for Foreigners. Lastly, recommendations for optimizing cooperation between immigration officers and interpreters are made and the need to improve interpreting quality during refugee hearings is signalled."
Notes on the employment of intercultural mediators and interpreters in health care
2012
Research has made clear that ethnic minorities may systematically receive a lower quality of health care than non-minorities. The Institute of Medicine (Smedley B, Stith A, Nelson A (eds), 2003) has stated that these disparities are partly related to stereotyping, biases and uncertainty on the part of health care providers. They also observe that the conditions in which many clinical encounters take place – characterized by high time pressure, cognitive complexity, and pressures for costcontainment – may enhance the likelihood that these processes will result in care poorly matched to minority patients’ needs. The selective impact of health care and social services and the quality of care received by ethnic minorities are factors that are increasingly linked to ethnic health inequalities (Murray-Garcia, 2002).
Through interpreters’ eyes: Comparing roles of professional and family interpreters
Patient Education and Counseling, 2008
We describe and compare the perceptions of professional and family member interpreters concerning their roles and tasks as interpreters in primary care clinical encounters.Encounters between physicians (19) and patients (24) accompanied by a professional (6) or a family (9) interpreter were videotaped. Stimulated recall was used to elicit interpreters’ perceptions of their role in the clinical encounter. We analyzed transcriptions of the interpreter interviews using Atlas-ti software.The roles professional interpreters identified were: information transfer; creating a safe environment for the patient; mediation between cultures; maintaining professional boundaries. Family interpreters perceived their roles (facilitating understanding; ensuring diagnosis and treatment; interacting with the health care system) as part of their responsibilities as a family member.Professional interpreters act mainly to ensure information transfer. Family interpreters act mainly as a third participant often speaking as themselves rather than rendering the words of doctor and patient into the other's language.To obtain the maximum benefit from a professional interpreter the physician must invite the interpreter to act as an advocate for the patient and a culture broker. Physicians should always use a professional interpreter to ensure accurate information transfer. A family member should often be included in encounters to serve as a valuable patient advocate.
TRANS. Revista de Traductología, 2021
Researchers have long been preoccupied with the issue of role in healthcare interpreting. However, most studies approach this construct in the course of medical consultations, leaving somewhat unattended other spaces and activities in which interpreters also participate. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the healthcare interpreters’ role in these areas. Drawing on participant observation, I examined the roles played by five interpreters at a hospital in Madrid for five months in activities different to provider-patient interactions (e.g. waiting with patients). Seven key roles were identified outside medical consultations: intercultural and moral mediator, patient advocate, institutional navigator, healthcare ambassador, information miner and companion/conversation partner. A key finding is that most events in which interpreters participate occur outside medical consultations, which makes it essential to shift the attention to the roles played in these alter...
The Medical Interpreter Mediation Role
Handbook of Research on Medical Interpreting
While it is claimed that the role of medical interpreters is constantly changing, perhaps it is the understanding of their role that is evolving. The aim of this chapter is to provide an initial exploration of the contextualized issues and challenges related to interpreting therapeutic communication. The qualitative data analysis of nine specialist certified medical interpreters showcase some of the therapeutic factors that influenced their approach and practice. In addition to the interlinguistic and intercultural communicative goals, interpreters utilized their interpersonal, communication, and mediation skills to meet several therapeutic objectives. Interpreters described mediating therapeutic interaction and intervention, playing a therapeutic mediation role in addition to well-known linguistic and cultural mediation roles. Interpreters described their preoccupation and engagement in the therapeutic process, suggesting specialist medical interpreters play an important role in th...
Intercultural-Communication-Challenge_-The-Interpreter's-Role-in-Health-Care-Interpreting.pdf
Redefining the Role of Translation and Interpreting in Cultural Evolution, 2018
A leader in community interpreting, Australia provides professional interpreting services within its public health system. Healthcare interpreters face various challenges for a variety of reasons, including cultural differences. Existing research on healthcare interpreting focuses on differences between a mainstream culture of healthcare professionals and ethnically diverse cultures of migrant patients. Interpreters are widely regarded as bicultural professionals able to provide cultural information on behalf of patients as necessary or whenever healthcare professionals ask for it. However, research on healthcare interpreting in a globalized era should consider the changing nature of culture. The question of whether the interpreter should be a cultural broker remains controversial. Based on an ethnographic study of healthcare interpreters at a public hospital in Australia, this chapter aims to survey how multiple perspectives on cultural evolution affect healthcare interpreting.