Intercultural Communication and Interpreters’ Roles: Widening Taxonomies for Effective Interaction Within the Healthcare Context

Abstract:

Trespassing the boundary of neutrality and role adoption among interpreters have been previously studied in the public service field (Goffman 1981; Wadensjö 1998;Weiss and Stuker 1999;Farooq and Fear 2003; Angelelli 2004; Bot 2005; Leanza 2007; Hsieh 2008). However, this still remains a controversial issue giving its high presence within interpreters’ training nowadays, and the desire of hospitals to provide quality interpretation for patients when the goal is to reach an effective interaction between patients and healthcare staff, as well as promoting intercultural communication in these encounters.

Studies in Spain such as Martin (2006) have highlighted the need for further research in the situation of community interpreting based on corpora which could lead to the improvement in training. The same issue is still highlighted by recent European Commission reports on medical interpreting regarding Spain among other European countries (Angelelli 2015).

The present paper aims to describe a new taxonomy established for the different roles adopted by the interpreter in the healthcare setting with face to face encounters, and the challenge of remaining neutral if success in communication is the ultimate goal. Our study offers a classification of the adopted roles within the healthcare context, an arena where feelings, emotions and delicate issues combine together making interpreting a challenging task.

This research was carried out in a Spanish hospital which provides face to face interpreting by a group of volunteer and professional interpreters to foreign patients in a multicultural setting. The importance of the study in the region lies in the fact that Andalusia has 87,434 of the 282,120 British residing population in Spain, according to the figures provided by the National Institute of Statistic up to January 2015. Half of these figures belong to Malaga province, the setting of our hospital. The aforementioned area also profits from an increase in health tourism, with several hospitals establishing partnerships with other European partner hospitals in order to receive their patients for treatment.

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