Providing Health Care In The Context Of Language Barriers

Global migration continues to increase, and with it comes increasing linguistic diversity. This presents obvious challenges for both healthcare provider and patient, and the chapters in this volume represent a range of international perspectives on language barriers in health care. A variety of factors influence the best ways of approaching and overcoming these language barriers, including cultural, geographical, political and practical considerations, and as a result a range of approaches and solutions are suggested and discussed. The authors in this volume discuss a wide range of countries and languages, and cover issues that will be familiar to all healthcare practitioners, including the role of informal interpreters, interpreting in a clinical setting, bilingual healthcare practitioners and working with languages with comparatively small numbers of speakers.

This edited volume demonstrates the fundamental role translation and interpreting play in multilingual crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited language proficiency of the main language(s) in which information is disseminated exposed people to additional risks, and the contributors analyse risk communication plans and strategies used throughout the world to communicate measures through translation and interpreting. They show that a political willingness to understand the role of language in public health could lead local and national measures to success, sampling approaches from across four continents. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of healthcare translation and interpreting, sociolinguistics and crisis communication, as well as practitioners of risk and crisis communication and professional translators and interpreters.

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.

Illustrating the diversity of disciplines that intersect within global health studies, Healthcare in Latin America is the first volume to gather research by many of the foremost scholars working on the topic and region in fields such as history, sociology, women’s studies, political science, and cultural studies. Through this unique eclectic approach, contributors explore the development and representation of public health in countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and the United States. They examine how national governments, whether reactionary or revolutionary, have approached healthcare as a means to political legitimacy and popular support. Several essays contrast modern biomedicine-based treatment with Indigenous healing practices. Other topics include universal health coverage, childbirth, maternal care, forced sterilization, trans and disabled individuals’ access to care, intersexuality, and healthcare disparities, many of which are discussed through depictions in films and literature. As economic and political conditions have shifted amid modernization efforts, independence movements, migrations, and continued inequities, so have the policies and practices of healthcare also developed and changed. This book offers a rich overview of how the stories of healthcare in Latin America are intertwined with the region’s political, historical, and cultural identities. Contributors: Benny J. Andrés, Jr. | Javier Barroso | Katherine E. Bliss | Eric D. Carter | David S. Dalton | Carlos S. Dimas | Sophie Esch | Renata Forste | David L. García León | Javier E. García León | Jethro Hernández Berrones | Katherine Hirschfeld | Emily J. Kirk | Gabriela León-Pérez | Manuel F. Medina | Christopher D. Mellinger | Alicia Z. Miklos | Nicole L. Pacino | Douglas J. Weatherford Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This volume grows out of the belief that diversity needs recognition and support from a favourable social environment. More precisely, the different members of diverse societies need recognition and support. This monograph is intended to provide a comparative perspective on the challenges faced in selected European countries (Croatia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia and the UK) with regard to equal access to healthcare and ways of handling them. The authors of the chapters comprising this volume, each within their specialty and in their own way, attempt to identify the different forms and dimensions in which we can be different and the barriers to our flourishing in, and with our differences.

This volume is the first to address multilingual healthcare communication around the globe and focuses on institutional, social and linguistic challenges and resources of the healthcare industry. It comprises studies from Canada, Australia, South Africa, Greenland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, and aims to introduce new paths of communicative and methodological agendas, casting a critical view on current linguistic practices in healthcare, nursing and medical interactions. With increased personal mobility in a global society, the need for multilingual staff is on the rise in medical institutions and healthcare organisations, and communicative competencies and practices involving different languages pose challenges for medical doctors, healthcare staff and patients alike. Many studies have highlighted the crucial role played by interpreters and interpreting staff, but the diversity of language situations in different countries requires very different approaches and solutions. Additionally, it may not be possible to develop a single agenda of language services for different medical areas with different needs for counselling, with various forms of treatment that require explanation and the patient‘s informed consent and with varying approaches to the relationship between medical professionals and patients. How to best organise medical (digital) language services in countries as different as South Africa, Greenland, Germany, Belgium and Australia calls for a diversity of possible solutions. The current volume makes a variety of such solutions and practices available for medical staff and healthcare institutions faced with international patients and working with international medical staff. It makes the challenges palpable on an international scale in a way that comparisons may be drawn between different solutions as well as their socio-cultural and institutional implications. This volume is intended for policy makers, medical and healthcare practitioners, institutions, interpreters, teachers and students in professional multilingual healthcare.

This book analyzes important international cases of immigrant and refugee health from diverse communication perspectives, providing theoretical frames and effective recommendations for designing future health communication campaigns and interventions for global health promotion. Internationally renowned scholars elucidate the reality of health communication situations that immigrants and refugees experience in host countries around the globe and examine how national and global health risk situations, including the COVID-19 pandemic, affect immigrant and refugee health during difficult health circumstances. Offering effective health communication strategies for promoting immigrant and refugee health, the book also provides lessons learned from past and present health communication campaigns, responses of diverse communities, and governmental policies. This book with many case studies from major host countries on different continents, this book will be of interest to anyone researching or studying in the areas of health communication, public health, international relations, public administration, nursing, and social work.

This volume is intended as an innovating reader for both interpreting practitioners as well as scholars, engaging with the multifaceted question addressed in the title “Why linking up with video?”. The chapters in this volume deal with this question from different perspectives. On the one hand, the volume continues the ongoing discussion on the pros and cons of video-based interaction for the interpreting profession, exploring the implications and applications when interpreters and their clients link up through video technology. On the other hand, the chapters also explore the potential of video technology for research on interpreting, hence raising the question in which way high-quality video recordings of interpreters in the booth, participants involved in interpreter-mediated talk, etc. may be instrumental in gaining new insights. In this sense, the volume strongly ties in with the fast-growing field of multimodal (interaction) studies, which makes use of video recordings to study the relationship between verbal and nonverbal resources, such as gestures, postural orientation, gaze and head movements, in the construction of meaning in communication.