Public Service Interpreting

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of remote
interpreting, yet research on several aspects of remote medical
interpreting (RMI) remains limited. Against this backdrop, this
study reports key findings from a survey of professional
healthcare interpreters with experience in RMI (N=47), addressing
various gaps in RMI research, including interlocutor distribution
and technology use, factors affecting interpreters’ perceived
impact of RMI on their performance, medical settings in which
RMI is used, and working conditions. Results indicate that most
interpreters have experience with both telephone interpreting (TI)
and video interpreting (VI) in the healthcare context,
encountering various medical settings, distribution patterns and
technological configurations. Quantitative findings reveal four
similar normative configurations of interlocutor distribution in
both TI and VI, each with slightly different normative
technologies. TI is perceived to have a more negative impact on
overall performance than VI, which receives more positive
evaluations regarding source text comprehension, target text
production, rapport between interlocutors, concentration, stress,
and fatigue. Qualitative results reveal common challenges shared
by TI and VI, with COVID-19 exacerbating some of them. This
study contributes to establishing a systematic understanding of
the complexity of RMI across multiple dimensions and provides a
nuanced perspective on both TI and VI.

Localisation action can be defined as a social action conducted by social "agents" to create a "Glocal" (global and local), market by producing creative, remarkable products and services with technology in a way that is socioculturally appropriate for a locale and presenting these products and services to glocal circulation. Since localisation is a multilayered, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomenon that extends to different fields from translation to marketing, from technology to sociology, from commerce to creativity, the field of localisation is a dynamic, ever-changing and transforming field that is in a hurry to keep up-to-date. This thesis aims to describe the field by examining the roles, functions, positions, transformations, conversions and investments of localisation actants from the lens of the Sociology of Translation by consulting Latour's ActorNetwork Theory (ANT) and Bourdieu's Field Theory, and their respective concepts of "actors", "actants", "networks", "forms of capital", and "conversion". The fieldwork consists of three phases: The Interview Phase, The Questionnaire Phase, and The Micro-Scaled Qualitative Corpus Phase consisting of job postings that posted on the LinkedIn network in the period between November 2023 and April 2024. Within the scope of the thesis, it has been determined that the agents in the localisation field prioritise 4 types of skill sets, namely linguistic competence, techn(olog)ical competence, communicative competence and creativity. Furthermore, actants, networks, capitals and investments within the localisation network are in a constant state of changes and conversions. These findings are the best indicators that the localisation network is a social and 'living' network.

Keywords: Localisation, Sociology of Translation, Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Forms of Capital, Conversions

This chapter aims to show how the collision of different linguistic ecologies and their often invisible components, such as multilingual repertoires and language ideologies, may explain why linguistic rights are not always achieved in the administration of justice. To this end, the chapter reviews a selection of analyses focusing on police interviews, asylum hearings and court hearings, where monolingual language ideologies erase the complexity of language use, including multilingual repertoires. Both interpreter-mediated encounters and cases where no interpreter is present are reviewed, and the studies represent either sociolinguistic and anthropological analyses focusing on the migrant's linguistic rights, or interpreting-studies analyses emphasising the interpreter's perspectives. In addition, a newspaper report of an "interpreting failure" in an asylum interview is analysed. The conclusion discusses the relations between linguistic repertoires and language ideologies, the productive nature of language ideologies and the ability of interpreting studies scholarship to address the issue of linguistic vulnerability that characterises interpretermediated encounters in the legal domain.

Marcos. Este es un artículo de acceso abierto, distribuido bajo los términos de la licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0) [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es] que permite el uso, distribución y reproducción en cualquier medio, siempre que la obra original sea debidamente citada de su fuente original. El acceso a la justicia de las poblaciones indígenas. Una necesidad desde el lenguaje Access to justice for indigenous peoples. A need from the language Acesso à justiça para populações indígenas. Necessidade de idioma

"Zwischenstationen – Kommunikation mit geflüchteten Menschen / Inbetween – Communicating with Refugees" focuses on situations where refugees get in touch with others at various stages of their journey. The presence of interpreters is often essential for understanding and being understood. This volume brings together voices from the field and those from research and teaching. The personal experience reports and academic contributions shed light on the challenges and opportunities of communication in a humanitarian setting. The focus is on community interpreting, crisis and administrative communication, legal aspects and the recurring question: How can the professional training of interpreters prepare them for the demands in this field? The book addresses students, interpreters, teachers, researchers and anyone who wants to gain an insight into this relevant social topic.

The article presents the training experience in home composting carried out with residents of the Vila Izidora community in partnership with IFMG – Santa Luzia Campus and Belo Horizonte City Hall – Sustainable Territories Project. The course was an opportunity to pass on technical composting knowledge to ordinary citizens, enabling access to a form of organic waste treatment that allows the retention of waste at the generating source and directly impacts the final destination of organic waste in the city of Belo Horizonte. The experience proved to be fully replicable in any city and can be carried out with little investment, which makes it possible to apply it as a public policy.

Corpus linguistics generally relies on textual sources to analyse representative instances of language use, be it written or spoken. However, the fundamental role of nonverbal and multimodal resources has come to the fore as they contribute tremendously to meaning-making processes, in both direct and mediated communication. This is all the more relevant in Interpreting Studies, where transcripts of mediated interactions can only reveal a partial picture of the communicative exchange. That is why attempts have been made to include multimodal resources (for instance, extralinguistic information, video and audio recordings) in corpus projects such as the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC), which set the basis for further interpreting corpora. This paper focuses on such developments and illustrates three more interpreting corpora, namely the Directionality in Simultaneous Interpreting (DIRSI) Corpus, the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC), and the Anglintrad Corpus and platform. These linguistic resources take advantage of multimodality to a different extent, offering textual and multimedia materials either separately or aligned to each other. All these examples are evidence of how important it is to maintain flexible formats and structures when developing an interpreting corpus, so that existing resources can be the springboard for further progress in the study of interpreting beyond the textual level.

This research unveils retrospective child language brokering experiences within local ethnic minorities in Turkey. Employing a multiple-case study research design, the investigation delves into the brokering experiences of three adult participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds – Kurdish, Arab, and Pomak communities. The semi-structured interviews shed light on individual encounters, including primary motivations and settings for brokering, employed translation strategies, perceived impacts of brokering, and the normativity of child language brokering. They also illuminate the societal positioning of these ethnic minorities, especially minority women, within Turkey and the prevailing state policies affecting minority language rights. The findings obtained are discussed in connection with a nuanced exploration of the contextual and historical dimensions surrounding these ethnic minorities. In this sense, departing from the prevailing focus on child language brokering within immigrant families, this research redirects attention to brokering practices among local ethnic minorities. Beyond the preliminary exploration of child language brokering in Turkey, this study is an early investigation into non-professional interpreting activities among ethnic minorities residing in the country. The study also generates implications that intersect the domains of public service interpreting and politics.

This study aims at presenting a picture of the perceptions of the interpreters working for refugees in legal and public healthcare settings in Türkiye with a focus on the psychological effects of their work. Taking this objective as a departure point, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the causes of psychological challenges, reactions to these challenges, coping strategies, and negative and positive psychological changes that interpreters went through in the course of their work. Interviews were analyzed following a thematic analysis procedure, complemented with the analysis of the questionnaire results. The findings revealed that the interpreters came under a degree of psychological strain, including psychological stress, in the course of their work. The reasons included trauma-related stories of refugees, service providers' lack of awareness of the interpreters' work specifications, unfavorable working conditions, and racism against refugees in the workplace. The interpreters were also found to show certain reactions to psychological challenges, including feeling sad, crying, and sleep problems among others. Findings also revealed that the interpreters employed a few strategies to cope with these challenges such as socializing with friends, and that the interpreting work with refugees led to mostly positive psychological changes on the interpreters. The changes involved gaining self-confidence and feeling stronger than before. The findings, pinpointing the needs for support structures for interpreters working for refugees in Türkiye, will feed into the overall discussions on the psychological dimensions of interpreting for refugee clients.

This article applies recent discussions of ethical aspects of Interpreting Studies to research on church interpreting. Lessons from this case study are then applied to field research on interpreting more broadly, with an emphasis on the specific ethical and methodological issues that arise when examining client expectations of interpreters. It begins with an examination of the concepts of informed consent and reputational risk as explored in the work of Elisabet Tiselius (2021, 2019), as well as the concept of positionality in the work of Chris Mellinger (2020). These ethical concepts are then applied to a critical reading of the research that focuses on locating problems and challenges of church interpreting and evaluating the performance of church interpreters (hereafter called PCE). This research, which began with the work of Adewuni Salawu (2010), sees the goal of research as improving the quality of church interpreting by offering an evaluation of the practice, using criteria created by each researcher. This tends to lead to arguments that church interpreting should be professionalized via training existing interpreters or replacing them with professionals. It is argued that research on PCE is ethically questionable, in light of recent discussions of research ethics, due to the selection of data and the placement of the researcher as the sole arbiter of interpreting quality. These choices lead inexorably to reputational risk for research participants. The paper then reflects on how researchers could engage in the evaluation of church interpreting more helpfully, if important modifications are made to the PCE. This then allows the wider relevance of these concerns to field research in Interpreting Studies to be discussed with a special emphasis on research seeking to understand client expectations of interpreters. In all cases, it is argued that the views and interests of those experiencing and delivering the interpreting must be foregrounded, even at the expense of restricting the research that can

The creation of a PSI register in Greece, primarily for asylum and immigration purposes, represents a significant stride towards a register of proficient and qualified interpreters for the entire Greek public sector. This initiative marks a pivotal turning point in the crisis management process, as it addresses the communication and language requirements of foreigners lacking a knowledge of Greek. Given the ongoing arrival of refugees and immigrants since 2015 (and the resulting issues) and noting that the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum uses contracted providers for all relevant interpretation services, setting up an interpreter register would be an appropriate and sustainable response to the increased interpretation requirements of the said Ministry, as well as of other public sector services. This paper presents an overview of the project launched to lay the necessary foundation for the establishment of a training, accreditation, and management framework for PSIs in the Greek public sector, spanning from untrained bilinguals to fully trained and academically recognized interpreters. The  paper aims to position PSI in the broader problem-solving effort of the refugee and immigration crisis in Greece since 2015.

Confronted with a crisis of unprecedented scale in the second quarter of
2020, Australian States and Territories had to adopt crisis management
strategies to ensure equitable access to services are guaranteed for all
communities. In this context, and because face-to-face interpreting was no
longer an option for each consultation, clinics, hospitals, and GP practices
were urged to resort to remote interpreting, i.e., the use of technologies to
gain access to an interpreter. After setting the Australian healthcare
interpreting scene against historical milestones, this article discusses the
usability of Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) in Australian healthcare
settings, the way the demands for this new modality were met, as well as
the perceptions of participants involved in remote communication. Findings
from a mixed method study are presented and discussed. The data collected
through surveys and interviews aimed to identify how and if the use of VRI
proved efficient, and if this modality was expected to replace onsite and
telephone interpreting and to what extent. The outcomes showed a shift
from Telephone Interpreting to Video Remote Interpreting as the preferred
remote modality, though onsite interpreting remains the preferred modality
of the participants involved in the communication exchange.

En el libro Con la ley a favor y la realidad en contra: intérpretes de lenguas indígenas en México, la doctora Cristina Kleinert, busca describir y analizar el proceso de formación y profesionalización de un grupo de intérpretes noveles de lenguas indígenas y sus primeras experiencias en el ámbito de la procuración de justicia. El libro cuenta el acompañamiento etnográfico que realizó durante diplomados de formación de intérpretes de lenguas indígenas en el estado de Puebla, México y las prácticas profesionales durante los primeros años del sistema de justicia adversarial.

This article provides a qualitative overview of the challenges posed by language (im)politeness in a dialogue interpreting class. The examples are extracted from a corpus of dialogue interpreting simulations in the Italian-Spanish language pair where Spanish is the foreign language for most of the students. Interpreting involves carrying out several mental activities simultaneously in a situation of communicative urgency. As a result, professionals will have to learn to allocate the mental effort where it is most needed. On the basis of the data, I will try to exemplify how, due to either an imbalance in the distribution of cognitive resources, or mental fatigue, or inadequate translation decisions, or poor language mastery, inexperienced subjects tend to concentrate on the propositional content of utterances while neglecting the sociopragmatics of the interaction. In particular, as regards linguistic (im)politeness, incorrect use of the pronouns of address or the omission of mitiga...

The new Companion Volume (CV) to the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) has significantly amplified the importance of mediation as a plurilingual language activity within its conceptualisation of communicative competence. This is to be warmly welcomed as a positive contribution to, and acknowledgement of, increasingly superdiverse plurilingual societies and the potential for multilingual language users/learners to act as ‘social agents’ in complex inter-lingual/cultural settings. However, this article wishes to raise a few important issues that need to be addressed in the new CV as, it is argued here, they have the potential of having a negative impact on the field of Community/Public-Service interpreting.

In this chapter, we analyze two sequences of a telephone-interpreted,
audio-recorded and transcribed screening interview conducted in Finland.
The participants included an agent, who asked the questions and
typed the interview record in Finnish, a professional interpreter translating
between Finnish and French (henceforth, interpreter) and an
asylum seeker (henceforth, interviewee) who communicated with the
interpreter in French. Significant comprehension problems between the
interpreter and the interviewee constituted a characterizing feature of
the encounter; hence, our goal in this chapter is to identify the potential
reasons for these problems. To this end, we analyze the linguistic
and interactional features of two such sequences. The analysis is based
mainly on conversation analysis (CA), emphasizing the sequential principle that the previous turn largely determines the features found in a
given turn. In addition, we take into account the constraints embedded
in telephone interpreting (TI) and those created by the mismatching linguistic resources of the interpreter and the interviewee. Therefore, the
CA approach is combined with insights from interpreting studies and
interactional sociolinguistics.

In general, the quality of public interpretation in Denmark is very uneven. Interpreting is often performed by people without formal qualifications such as a relevant education. The lack of professionalism and quality assurance is detrimental to law and order as well as patient safety, and both the Danish National Audit Office and the Danish Institute for Human Rights have sharply criticized the situation. The article proposes a new quality
assurance model with certification and research-based education as core activities.
The model addresses all points of criticism and aims to solve the current problem.

Bachground: Worldwide, more than 79.5 million people are forcibly displaced, including a significant number of migrant and refugee families with children. Migration and refugeedom affect these families in different dimensions, such as mental, physical and spiritual health. Identifying family needs and enhancing parenting skills can improve family cohesion and health, as well as smooth integration into the host country. This review is part of the Erasmus+ funded project- IENE 8 (Intercultural Education for Nurses in Europe) aiming at empowering migrant and refugee families regarding parenting skills. Methods: This was a scoping review of literature. The IENE 8 partner countries (Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, and United Kingdom) searched for peer reviewed papers, grey literature and mass media reports at international, European and national level. The time period for the search of scientific and grey literature was between2013-2018, and for mass media, it was between 2016 a...

In recent years, there has been a noticeable emphasis on migration processes framed within the context of a 'crisis.' This emphasis underscores a unique and exceptional temporality. The 'European migration crisis' has presented an unprecedented challenge, leading governments to predominantly adopt an emergency-oriented approach as the exclusive means to address and conceptualise this crisis. This contribution aims to elucidate how the 'emergency's structural time,' posited as a distinct and universally applicable notion, can profoundly influence the practical aspects of social frameworks, perceptions, experiences, and practices involving various actors within the Italian asylum reception system. Through empirical analysis of specific cases that emerged during extensive ethnographic fieldwork between 2016 and 2020, focusing on bureaucratic practices, relationships, and intimacy, I will illustrate an ongoing transformative interplay between Time and the various processes outlined 'in Time.' More specifically, this study delves into the waiting experiences of asylum seekers on the one hand and the hectic experiences of social operators working within the asylum reception system on the other. The objective is to demonstrate how the prevailing emergency-centric approach within this system steers these individuals into specific temporal frameworks. As a result, external influences and pressures render the realisation of their hoped-for near future unattainable, leaving the present disconnected from their particular aspirations. This mechanism initiates processes that disrupt existence, thereby compromising prospects of stability. Nonetheless, these subjects can develop and implement specific strategies to circumvent constraints and mitigate the institutional violence and exclusion that often characterise the Italian asylum reception system.

Linguistic differences between patients and clinicians can result in ineffective and inequitable healthcare delivery. Medical students should therefore be facilitated to develop the requisite knowledge and skills to work effectively within language discordant clinical situations. This paper explores language interpreting processes in an undergraduate medical education programme. The study utilizes a constructivist paradigm incorporating an action research approach. Action Research Cycle 1 (ARC1) examines the use of interpreters during clinical examinations while Action Research Cycle 2 (ARC2) focuses on language translation technology. In Action Research Cycle 3 the data that was generated in ARC 1 and ARC 2 is reviewed in association with international literature to develop a framework for practice. This study demonstrates that language interpreting procedures should be based within a collaborative framework with students, interpreters and educators receiving appropriate educationa...