Interpreting in Flemish Hospitals: Interpreters’ View and Healthcare Workers’ Expectations

In Flanders (Belgium) social interpreters and intercultural mediators help bridge the communication gap between foreign language speaking patients and healthcare workers. This paper reports on a comparative survey among social interpreters and intercultural mediators with a focus on how they perceive their role and tasks as interpreters in a healthcare setting. We examine if this is related to different codes of conduct and task descriptions. The survey showed that intercultural mediators feel that they can take on various roles, and have a whole range of responsibilities and duties, much more than social interpreters. In practice, social interpreters find it difficult to stick to their code of conduct. Another survey among healthcare workers working inside a hospital revealed that, in general, their expectations of an interpreter correspond more to the profile of an intercultural mediator than to the profile of a social interpreter.En Flandes (Bélgica), los intérpretes sociales y mediadores interculturales ayudan a cerrar la brecha de comunicación entre los pacientes que hablan lenguas extranjeras y el personal sanitario. El presente artículo pretende informar sobre una encuesta comparativa entre intérpretes sociales y mediadores interculturales, en la que se pregunta cómo perciben su papel y sus tareas como intérpretes en un entorno de atención sanitaria, y si se relaciona con diferentes códigos de conducta y descripciones de tareas. La encuesta demostró que los mediadores interculturales se sienten capaces de asumir diferentes papeles, y que tienen toda una serie de responsabilidades y deberes, mucho más amplios que los intérpretes sociales. En la práctica, los intérpretes sociales encuentran dificultades para apegarse a su código de conducta. Otra encuesta realizada entre personal sanitario que trabaja en un hospital reveló que, en general, las expectativas que tienen del intérprete corresponden más al perfil de mediador intercultural que al perfil de intérprete social

A non-native-speaking patient with and without an interpreter: what is the difference? A case study in mental health

Communication is vital in psychiatry, but it can be impaired when speakers do not share a language or lack language proficiency. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, we examine how the interpreter’s presence has an impact on communication between psychiatrist and patient in a psychiatric consult; secondly, we explore the possibility to compare two different types of language mediation (in this case, a professional interpreter and Dutch as a foreign language to the patient) through the triangulation of data and analytic methods. In this respect, two psychiatric consultations were video-recorded. Additionally, a retrospective interview was conducted with the psychiatrist. The discursive data were analysed using conversation analysis focusing on turn design, question-answer sequences, and topic development, combined with quantitative elements (e.g. turn count) and the results from a thematic analysis of the interview transcription. The analysis revealed advantages and disadvantages in working with an interpreter and showed some discrepancies between the psychiatrist’s perceptions or expectations and what we found in the discursive data. We conclude that the combination of research methods provides valuable insights into psychiatric consultations with and without an interprete

Transformative practice and its interactional challenges in Covid-19 telephone contact tracing in Flanders

This article focuses on transformative interactional practice in COVID-19 contact tracing telephone calls in Flanders (Belgium). It is based on a large corpus of recorded telephone conversations conducted by COVID-19 contact tracers with index patients in the period mid-2020 to mid-2022. The calls were conducted through government-contracted commercial call centers. For nearly 2 years and applied country-wide, this was the most prominent strategy in Belgium for breaking transmission chains. COVID-19 telephone contact tracing with infected patients counts as transformative professional work in two ways. First, in addition to the registration of recent contacts in a relevant time window, the work is oriented to awareness-raising about how patients and their co-dwellers can and should adjust their behavior by attending actively to critical aspects of the pandemic during an individual period of (potential) infection. This is the terrain of advice, interdictions and recommendations about quarantine, isolation, personal hygiene, etc. In addition, the focus on interactional attention indexes patients’ affect and emotions (e.g., anxiety, worry, or anger) in a period of health uncertainty and social isolation. The transformative work thus depends on successfully established rapport and empathetic, responsive behavior. Our analysis of the recorded conversational sequences focuses on the complexities of client-sensitive and responsive transformative sequences and highlights the constraints and affordances which surround the interactional task of ‘instructional awareness raising’ which is central to telephone contact tracing. Specifically, we detail the following dimensions of transformative sequences: (i) how do contact tracers deal with the knowledge status of clients, (ii) their use of upgrading/downgrading formulations, (iii) the use of humor and other mitigating strategies, and (iv) how contact tracers attend to interactional displays of affect and emotion. In a final section, we tie together our observations about the communication of particularized advice in a context of general measures through the twin notions of categorization/particularization-work. The findings in this paper are limited to the first step in the chain of contact tracing, i.e., telephone calls with tested and infected citizens