Decision-making in paediatric palliative care interpreting

The interpreting profession has long used metaphors or rule statements to describe and teach the ways in which practitioners make decisions (Dean & Pollard, 2011, 2018). Interpreting students are also often taught that the context of an encounter will dictate their decision-making by way of statements such as “it depends”. Such pedagogical statements can make talk between a practitioner and a medical professional about the responsibilities of an interpreter during medical encounters difficult. This study is based on the work of Dean and Pollard (2011, 2018) on value-based decision-making and is guided by the four principles of biomedical ethics (respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice). It has sought to provide evidence of the existence, applicability and usability of these frameworks through a single case study of a real-life appointment in which a parent of a palliative care outpatient and a medical professional communicated during a consultation, aided by a medical interpreter.

Reflection-in-action: Measuring ‘context’ in medical interpreting

Community interpreting scholarship has solidly established the importance of appreciating the nuances of context to effective interpreting practice (Angelelli, 2004; Wadensjo?, 1998). Several frameworks for identifying and articulating the way context affects interpreting work have been articulated (Dean & Pollard, 2011). What is less well documented is the way interpreters learn to develop an understanding of context and how that subsequently informs their practice. This article describes the development and implementation of a tool to assess interpreters’ facility in identifying and articulating context – specifically in healthcare settings. The activities and the assessment tool are grounded in the educational theories of Donald Schön and his foregrounding of the intuitive practice abilities of professionals. The resulting assessment tool was refined through its use in postgraduate courses in healthcare interpreting, where various aspects of the healthcare context were explained using videos of provider–patient interactions. Through reflective practice activities, students analysed their practical knowledge and skills and improved their context-based insight. Currently designed for signed language interpreters in medical settings based in the United States, this multi-component assessment tool can be adapted to various contexts in community interpreting.

Simulating the context of interpreter-mediated social work interactions via interprofessional education

Interpreters and social workers frequently work together. They share some common goals and there is some similarity between the ethical guidelines that both professions follow. Despite this, interpreter-mediated social work encounters are rarely described, especially from the perspective of interpreting studies. Even more infrequent are studies that focus on trainee interpreters’ and social workers’ engagement in interprofessional education (IPE). Details of the design and delivery of IPE training sessions for interpreting and social work students, at Monash University from May 2017 to May 2019, are provided. The sessions featured two role-plays that simulated typical interactions in which interpreters and social workers work together. To assess the effectiveness of the IPE training in meeting both general and specific learning outcomes, three research questions were posed and the responses are reported in this article. The questions relate to the reported usefulness of role-plays in enabling the acquisition of desirable skills and knowledge; an increase in the level of knowledge of the other professional group, one’s own group and the perceived benefits for service-users; and the usefulness of pre- and post-interactional activities, such as briefing and debriefing. Responses to questionnaires were received from 218 of the 442 participating students. On a Likert scale with five gradings the average levels of agreement regarding the usefulness of role-plays are high, as are the levels of agreement about increases in knowledge of the other professional group and those of the students’ own professional group. The student informants reported that the skills they gained are likely to be beneficial to clients and patients with limited English proficiency. The trainees’ responses to their pre- and post-interactional interactions show that both groups registered a high level of agreement that briefings and debriefings are useful.

impact of context on community interpreting research, practice & training

Although the notion of context is omnipresent in research in interpreting studies (IS), especially in community settings, and defines the ways in which interpreting is being practised, researched and trained, it has not yet been recognized or defined as a topic in its own right, at least not within IS. Starting from some theoretical notions on the concept of context, this article moves on to discuss different levels of context, namely, geographical, socio-institutional and interactional. By means of examples from a variety of settings in community interpreting (CI), it shows how the different levels of context interact, and, in these ways, have an impact on CI practice, research and training.

Narratives in conflict and the limits on the interpreter’s agency: A case study from the UN Peacekeeping mission in Lebanon

This article presents a socio-linguistic analysis of interpreting in conflict zones and paints a picture of the limits on the interpreter’s agency when working in the field. It focuses on the interpreter’s behaviour towards cultural and linguistic barriers in communication between foreign military personnel and the civilian population in Lebanon. The aim is to analyse the level of agency that the interpreter has when working in a military deployment, taking into account the context and the narrative features that require mediation. Data were gathered through interviews with interpreters in Lebanon and analysed by applying narrative theory. Knowing and appreciating both the theoretical context and the linguistic and cultural barriers identified through the analysis are fundamental to understanding the difficult role that the interpreter-mediator plays in conflict settings and to reflecting on interpreter training that is appropriate to this context.

The Empathic Communication Analytical Framework (ECAF): A multimodal perspective on emotional communication in interpreter-mediated consultations

Empathic communication (EC) in healthcare occurs when patients express empathic opportunities, such as emotions, to which doctors respond empathically. This interactional process during which participants try to achieve specific communicative goals (e.g., seeking and displaying empathy) serves as a context in which doctors and patients perform verbal and nonverbal actions and collaboratively co-construct meaning. This applies to interpreter-mediated consultations (IMCs) too, where interpreters perform additional actions of a similar kind. However, there is a dearth of research on the ways in which participants perform these actions in the context of EC, and how these actions in turn help (re)shape the context of EC in IMCs (Theys et al., 2020). To date, any tools for studying EC investigate participants’ actions in isolation, without studying them in the context of EC or in relation to the participants’ awareness of their own and others’ ongoing interactions. In this article, we present the Empathic Communication Analytical Framework (ECAF). The tool draws on valid, complementary analytical tools that allow for a fine-grained, three-level multimodal analysis of interactions. The first level of analysis allows for instances of EC in spoken language IMCs to be identified and for participants’ verbal actions in the context of EC to be studied. The second level allows analysts to investigate participants’ verbal and nonverbal actions in the previously identified context of EC. The third level of analysis links the participants’ concurrent verbal and nonverbal (inter)actions to their levels of attention and awareness and shows how participants’ actions are shaped and in turn help to reshape the context of EC in IMCs. In this article, we present the various levels of the ECAF framework, discuss its application to real-life data, and adopt a critical stance towards its affordances and limitations by looking into one excerpt of EC in IMCs. It is shown that the three distinct yet interconnected levels of analysis in the ECAF framework allow participants’ concurrent multimodal interactions in the context of EC to be studied.