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Linguistically and culturally competent human interpreters play a crucial role in facilitating language-discordant interpersonal healthcare communication. Traditionally, interpreters work alongside patients and healthcare providers to provide in-person interpreting services. However, problems with access to professional interpreters, including time pressure and a lack of local availability of interpreters, have led to an exploration and implementation of alternative approaches to providing language support. They include the use of communication technologies to access professional interpreters and volunteers but also the application of various language and translation technologies. This chapter offers a critical review of four different approaches, all of which are conceptualised as different types of human-machine interaction: technology-mediated interpreting, crowdsourcing of volunteer language mediators via digital platforms, machine translation, and the use of translation apps populated with pre-translated phrases and sentences. Each approach will be considered in a separate section, beginning with a review of the relevant scholarly literature and main practical developments, followed by a discussion of critical issues and challenges arising. The focus is on dialogic communication and interaction. Technology-assisted methods of translating written texts are not included.

Training translators to react to sudden emergencies is a challenge. This article presents the results of a training experiment testing the speed of acquisition of the skills necessary to operate the open-source Moses statistical machine translation (SMT) system. A task-based approach was used with trainee translators who had no experience working with MT technology. The experiment is a feasibility study to ascertain whether training on Moses SMT could be considered for long-lasting crisis scenarios. The article reports its findings in four sections. The first section discusses the research context in which ‘crisis translation’ is defined; the second section illustrates the rationale of the experiment; the third section looks at the results of the training experiment; and the fourth at the trainees’ perceptions of their learning processes. The conclusion reflects on the viability of using Moses and on the next phases needed to refine the findings of this first experiment.

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