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The Visible Co-Participant: The Interpreter’s Role in Doctor-Patient Encounters
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The Visible Co-Participant : 3 Speakers of the more dominant and less dominant cultures come into contact through interpreters. The ways in which interpreters play their roles may vary significantly according to the different settings in which interpretation takes place (e.g., court, community, or conference interpreting ) or according to the rules that the various professional associations prescribe. The role of the interpreter is complex and multifaceted. Understanding this role will lead to a deeper understanding of how communication happens between minority and majority speakers when it is brokered by an interpreter. Understanding the complexities that are associated with the role of the interpreter is crucial to studying intercultural communication in its broadest sense (Angelelli, 2000). This chapter explores an example of medical interpreting and demonstrates the complexities underlying this kind of interaction. Interpreters have traditionally been portrayed as invisible language “conduits” (Reddy, 1979) whose role is defined as decoders and encoders of two languages (Seleskovitch & Lederer, 1989; Weber, 1984). This notion of invisibility has various underlying assumptions. One assumption is that meaning is monolithic rather than co-constructed. Another assumption is that the interpreter can temporarily block the self and all the behaviors that may result (automatically or voluntarily) as a consequence of being a social person who interacts with the other two parties (Berk-Seligson, 1990; Metzger, 1999; Roy, 1989; Wadensjö, 1998b). This extreme view is still prevalent in professional organizations and schools that train translators and interpreters. The Visible Co-Participant: The Interpreter’s Role in Doctor-Patient Encounters Claudia Angelelli 4 : C L A U D I A A N G E L E L L I The next section briefly discusses how new trends in the literature portray the role of the interpreter in various settings and specifically looks at the medical setting where the interpreted communicative event (ICE) discussed in this chapter occurs. NEW TRENDS IN THE INTERPRETING LITERATURE In the last two decades, research that has crossed over from sociolinguistics has begun to emphasize crucial differences among different types of interpretation, specifically among conference, court, medical, and community interpreting. The differences that have been the focus of the dialogic research (Wadensjö, 1995, after Bakhtin, 1981) lie along the nature of the communicative event (Hymes, 1974). Interpretation is no longer seen as a two-party conversation with what I call an “invisible” interpreter assisting communication (Michael & Cocchini, 1995) but, rather, as a three-party conversation in which the interpreter plays an active or, in my term, “visible” role (Angelelli, 2001). Well-documented ethnographies of interpreters in the courtroom (BerkSeligson , 1990) or studies at the police station (Wadensjö, 1995) show evidence of the visibility of interpreters. In the courtroom, as at the police station, interpreters become visible simply by making use of different linguistic devices. The use of (a) either a more or a less polite way of addressing one of the parties or (b) the restatement of an utterance in different forms (by adding or omitting jargonistic remarks or by switching from formal to informal register) are examples of those devices. In the court setting, this active role was explored by Berk-Seligson (1990) in her ethnography of the courtroom. By the manipulation of the use of polite forms, interpreters in the bilingual courtroom become more or less visible. When rules that relate to the work of an interpreter in a court of law are established, however, the complexity of the job as laid down by Berk-Seligson is reduced to a controllable and automatic neutral position. Focusing on community interpreting, Wadensjö (1995) provides evidence of social and interactive skills in her study of community interpreting at a Swedish police station. Her work addresses distribution of responsibility and looks mainly at how responsibility “for the progression and the substance of interaction is distributed in and through talk” (p. 112). [3.237.87.69] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:22 GMT) The Visible Co-Participant : 5 She presents a piece of authentic discourse: a fragment of a dialogue at a Swedish police station between an immigration officer and a recent Russian immigrant during which the officer asked the immigrant about her future plans. From the discourse analysis performed, Wadensjö concludes that the interpreter’s role during the interaction goes beyond a traditional channel that simply expresses information. She argues that interpreters coconstruct meaning together with the interlocutors, and all parties to the conversation share that responsibility during interpretation. In this sense, the co-construction of meaning and the responsibility that interlocutors and the interpreter...