This qualitative study is conducted via focus groups with 47 Australian public service interpreters to investigate their responses to vicarious trauma (VT) in their practice, the influence of culture, and their views on how to maintain mental well-being. While participant interpreters employ various strategies to deal with traumatic client content and other work stressors, cultural inhibitors are found to prevent some from sharing their emotional vulnerability or seeking professional help. They indicated that they want to be treated with respect and as part of the professional team, rather than a machine or a shadow. Professional development is needed to clarify the limits of confidentiality, explain trauma and its vicarious possibilities, and to establish interpreters’ professional entitlement to briefing and debriefing. Stakeholders including educators, professional associations, interpreting agencies, and other professions and institutional users of interpreting services should work respectfully and collaboratively to prevent and help interpreters recover from VT.

No abstract

No abstract

Police interviews are high-stakes activities that bear legal consequences when the cases move to court proceedings. A wide range of literature exists on police interviewing strategies aiming to obtain complete information from the interviewee; however, this literature focuses primarily on monolingual settings only. This paper reports on an empirical study examining the word choices made by interpreters of 11 selected languages in three scripted police interview excerpts. The study found that considered verbal strategies deliberately employed by police in investigative interviewing may be interfered with by the interpreter in a bilingual setting. The authors discuss the implications of such linguistic intervention for police interview outcomes and propose improvements for the training of interpreters and police. IntroductionThrough an empirical study, the authors seek to demonstrate how inadvertent word choices by interpreters, using strategies available to them under the constant pressure to perform in real-time, may impact on questioning techniques formulated strategically by the police. Interpreting outcomes may have far-reaching implications beyond the police interviewing room, once the case being investigated moves into criminal proceedings in the legal system.The authors commence the paper with an overview of the importance of police interviewing and the societal context in which interpreted police interviews take place. The role of the interpreter in a bilingual setting, their cognitive processes during performance and the cross-lingual transferring strategies they employ, is then explained. The empirical study is introduced in the following section. In this study, a number of interpreters were required to interpret specially selected excerpts of police interviewing questions in laboratory settings. This section is followed by an analysis of the findings, and discussions on ways to mitigate the impact of interpreter linguistic intervention on police interviewing outcomes.Although over the last few decades significant advancement has been achieved, respectively, in theoretical and empirical research into best-practice police interviewing and in interpreting performance analysis, there has been little evidence of cross-pollination between these two fields. Through this paper, the authors wish to bring to the attention of

Interpreter training has evolved from traditional face-to-face classroom settings to alternative modes of delivery such as online and blended learning because of the rise in information and communication technology. The limited body of literature shows that the most documented pedagogical application of interpreter training delivery is via virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. To enrich the literature on technology use in interpreter training, a pilot project was conducted in which participant students and trainers accessed a three-dimensional virtual environment using wearable technology (i.e., three-dimensional virtual reality glasses) and students practiced interpreting using a prerecorded animated dialogue. A virtual reality platform was built using Unity 3D and run on Android to host the piloted dialogue, with a view to adding dialogues in the future to develop it into a healthcare interpreting training platform. Qualitative data collected through observations and semi-structured interviews were analyzed. The results show that using wearable devices in interpreter training has the potential to create immersive simulated environments for auto­nomous learning and to improve interpreter training when used with instructional support. However, challenges including physiological effects, level of authenticity, and the need for equipment support warrant further exploration and refinement of its pedagogical application in the future.