Interpreting In Legal And Healthcare Settings

The importance of quality interpreting in legal and healthcare settings can never be stressed enough, when any mistake – no matter how small – can compromise the delivery of justice or put someone’s health at risk. This book addresses issues arising from interpreting in legal and healthcare settings by presenting cutting-edge research findings in interpreting and interpreter education in a number of countries around the world – including those which are relatively new to the field. It contains selected papers from a conference dedicated to such themes – the First International Conference on Legal and Healthcare Interpreting – as well as other invited papers related to the fields of legal and healthcare interpreting. This book is useful not only to scholars and educators, interpreters and translators working in legal or healthcare settings, but also to legal and healthcare professionals who work with interpreters in their day-to-day work, including judges, lawyers, police officers, doctors, midwives and nurses.

What is community interpreting? What are the roles of the community interpreter? What are the standards, evaluation methods and accreditation procedures pertaining to community interpreting? What training is available or required in this field? What are the current issues and practices in community interpreting in different parts of the world? These key questions, discussed at the first international conference on community interpreting, are addressed in this collection of selected conference papers. The merit of this volume is that it presents the first comprehensive and global view of a rapidly growing profession, which has developed out of the need to provide services to those who do not speak the official language(s) of a country. Both the problems and the successes related to the challenge of providing adequate community interpreting services in different countries are covered in this volume.

This volume – the first-ever collection of research on healthcare interpreting – centers on three interrelated themes: cross-cultural communication in healthcare settings, the interactional role of persons serving as interpreters and the discourse patterns of interpreter-mediated interaction. The individual chapters, by seven innovative researchers in the area of community-based interpreting, represent a pioneering attempt to look beyond stereotypical perceptions of interpreter-mediated interactions. First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting 7:2 (2005), this volume offers insights into the impact of the interpreter – whether s/he is a trained professional or a member of the patient's family – including ways in which s/he may either facilitate or impair reliable communication between patient and healthcare provider. The five articles cover a range of settings and specialties, from general medicine to pediatrics, psychiatry and speech therapy, using languages as diverse as Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Italian and Spanish in combination with Danish, Dutch, English and French.

This volume of selected papers from the second Critical Link conference (Vancouver, 1998) shows a marked evolution in Community Interpreting (CI) since the first Critical Link conference of 1995. In the intervening three years the field has advanced from pioneering to professionalization in response to new social needs created by the influx of immigrants into the developed countries, or by an awakened sensitivity to the rights of those countries’ aboriginal peoples. Most of the papers discuss professionalization in terms of standards, tests and examinations; training; accreditation; and professional organizations that establish and administer professional standards. The collection reveals similar concerns about these issues throughout the world and a global focus on ‘standards’. With a Foreword by Brian Harris.

At long last community interpreters are coming into their own as professionals in various parts of the world. At the same time, the complexity of their practice has been thrown into sharp relief. In this thought-provoking volume of selected papers from the third Critical Link conference held in 2001 (Montreal), we see a profession that is carving out a place for itself amid political adversity, economic constraints and a host of historical and cultural conditions. Community interpreters are learning to work better with governments, courts, police, psychologists, doctors, patients, refugees, violent offenders, and human rights missions in war-torn countries. From First Peoples to minority language speakers to former refugees and members of the Deaf community, interpreters are seeking out the training, legal protection and credentials they need. They are standing up to be counted in surveys, reaping the fruits of specialization and contributing to salient academic discussions on language, communication and translation studies.

The Practice of Court Interpreting describes how the interpreter works in the court room and other legal settings. The book discusses what is involved in court interpreting: case preparation, ethics and procedure, the creation and avoidance of error, translation and legal documents, tape transcription and translation, testifying as an expert witness, and continuing education outside the classroom. The purpose of the book is to provide the interpreter with a map of the terrain and to suggest methods that will help insure an accurate result. The author, herself a practicing court interpreter, says: “The structure of the book follows the structure of the work as we do it.” The book is intended as a basic course book, as background reading for practicing court interpreters and for court officials who deal with interpreters.

The current volume contains selected papers submitted after Critical Link 5 (Sydney 2007) and arises from its topic – quality interpreting being a communal responsibility of all the participants. It takes the much discussed theme of professionalisation of community interpreting to a new level by stating that achieving quality depends not only on the technical skills and ethics of interpreters, but equally upon all other parties that serve multilingual populations: speakers, employers and administrators, educational institutions, researchers, and interpreters. Major articles outline both innovative practices in legal and medical settings and prevailing deficiencies in community interpreting in different countries. While Part I, A shared responsibility: The policy dimension, addresses the macro environment of specific social policy contexts with constrains that affect interpreting, Part II, Investigations and innovations in quality interpreting, reveals a number of admirable cases of interpreters working together with their client institutions in a variety of social settings. Part III is dedicated to the questions of Pedagogy, ethics and responsibility in interpreting. The collection is an important reference book catering to the interpreting community: interpreting practitioners and interpreter users, researchers, educators, and students.

Interpreting studies have exponentially grown over the years propelled by the realities of multicultural societies which, among other factors, include constant waves of immigration and the subsequent allocation of newly arrived citizens in their host countries—a process entailing public service access and provision. Communicative interactions between users who do not speak the same language as public service providers have been largely studied in different settings belonging to the field Public Service Translation and Interpreting (PSIT), ranging from police, asylum, legal, educational or, focus of this book, healthcare contexts. This edited book offers a unique and updated insight into the research advances and the state of the art in healthcare interpreting. Contributions cover methodological innovations, together with hot topics, such as changing roles, gender, specialized contexts, training programs, and ethical codes, to name but a few.