Do you get the message? Defining the interpreter’s role in medical interpreting in Belgium

This paper aims to investigate the field-level realities of the codes of conduct adhered to by different agencies in Belgium for community interpreters, and the degree of interpreter discretion in the application of these codes. We focus on the specific setting of the health care sector in Brussels, where community interpreters and intercultural mediators sent out by different agencies often operate in the same hospitals. Drawing on data obtained through participant observation, interviews with key actors in the field and desk research, we analyze how the codes of conduct applied by different agencies affect multilingual and intercultural communication in a hospital context, in particular at those levels of the communication process where misunderstandings occur most often.Este artículo analiza las distintas deontologías utilizadas por los intérpretes sociales de diferentes agencias en el contexto hospitalario en Bélgica y el grado de discreción que tienen en la aplicación de estas deontologías. Nuestro ámbito de estudio se localiza en la región de Bruselas, donde los intérpretes sociales y los mediadores interculturales operan en el mismo lugar, pero cada uno con su propia deontología. Los datos que se presentan proceden tanto de la revisión bibliográfica existente, como de la observación de los participantes en los hospitales públicos bruselenses, así como de entrevistas con personas clave en la interpretación social en estos hospitales. Los análisis realizados permiten testar cómo afectan estas diferentes deontologías a la comunicación multilingüe e intercultural, centrándonos en aquellos aspectos de la comunicación que conllevan un mayor riesgo de ser malinterpretados

Technology Use by Public Service Interpreters and Translators: The Link Between Frequency of Use and Forms of Prior Training

Abstract: In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof.Resumen: En este artículo, presentaremos los resultados preliminares de un estudio a gran escala sobre el uso de instrumentos tecnológicos utilizados para facilitar la comunicación para la provisión de servicios en entornos multilingües. Nos centraremos en las respuestas proporcionadas por sujetos que trabajan como traductores e intérpretes en los servicios públicos (PSITs, por sus siglas en inglés, N=188). No se realizó ninguna distinción entre los distintos dominios de los servicios públicos para este estudio (por ejemplo, educación, salud, etc.) Pretendemos averiguar la influencia del tipo de formación que los traductores e intérpretes han recibido sobre el uso de herramientas tecnológicas, como traducción asistida por ordenador, traducción automática, mensajería instantánea, videoconferencia y programas de gestión terminológica.

The medical consultation through the lenses of language and social interaction theory

The well-structured medical communication models that are typically described in textbooks are relevant to practice, but the actual messy interactional realities of consultations are often a far cry away from them. As a result, medical trainees frequently encounter difficulties when applying communication skills acquired during training to medical practice. This paper reflects on how clinical communication research and courses can incorporate the growing need for context-bound communication skills training. This paper illustrates how concepts from the research field of language and social interaction can facilitate the description and analysis of communication in clinical encounters, drawing on a real-life example from an increasingly common clinical scenario: a consultation in the emergency department involving a patient who does not speak the same language as the clinician. The proposed way of looking at clinical communication can enrich clinical skills training as it provides a tool to study, analyze, visualize and discuss communication from a different perspective that simultaneously accounts for interactional and clinical reasoning aspects of medical consultations.status: accepte

The dynamics of (mis)communication in language discordant multi-party consultations in the Emergency Department

status: publishe

Multilingual consultations in urgent medical care

More than half of the world's displaced population has moved to urban or peri-urban areas, and in Brussels, the superdiverse Belgian and European capital, the emergency care sector provides an important setting for analysing the multilingual challenges faced by health practitioners. To gain a better insight in the interactional dynamics of emergency department consultations with immigrant patients, this paper focuses on multilingual strategies that include 'ad hoc' communicative solutions used in the absence of professional interpreters (lingua franca use, non-verbal communication, medical translation software, language mediation through companions or hospital staff). Despite their efforts, the participants in our two case-studies lacked the linguistic and interpreting subtleties needed to perform complex linguistic-interactional tasks, and in this way, a form of 'false fluency' was created. Ad hoc multilingual solutions, significant as they are, require additional language support to avoid diagnostic insecurity. At the level of patient management, a 'linguistic assessment' of patients could potentially be integrated into the triage process, and clinicians should be trained on how to recognise and remediate communication problems under the specific conditions of the emergency department

The challenge of obtaining informed consent in a highly multilingual hospital emergency department

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

El uso de la tecnología por los intérpretes y traductores de los servicios públicos: el enlace entre la frecuencia de uso y las formas de formación previa

In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof.En este artículo, presentaremos los resultados preliminares de un estudio a gran escala sobre el uso de instrumentos tecnológicos utilizados para facilitar la comunicación para la provisión de servicios en entornos multilingües. Nos centraremos en las respuestas proporcionadas por sujetos que trabajan como traductores e intérpretes en los servicios públicos (PSITs, por sus siglas en inglés, N=188). No se realizó ninguna distinción entre los distintos dominios de los servicios públicos para este estudio (por ejemplo, educación, salud, etc.) Pretendemos averiguar la influencia del tipo de formación que los traductores e intérpretes han recibido sobre el uso de herramientas tecnológicas, como traducción asistida por ordenador, traducción automática, mensajería instantánea, videoconferencia y programas de gestión terminológica

Babeliris, Brussels multilingual project: Linguistic competences and intercultural dynamics in Brussels hospitals: the impact of oral and written communication on social inequality in healthcare

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Technology Use by Public Service Interpreters and Translators: The Link between Frequency of Use and Forms of Prior Training.

In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof.status: publishe

Clinical Work in Language-Discordant Emergency Department Consultations

status: publishe