Community interpreters versus intercultural mediators

Abstract

This article compares the professional profile of community interpreters to that of a particular group of intercultural mediators who work as non-professional, untrained interpreters, mainly in healthcare settings. Through a textual comparison of 13 deontological documents for community interpreters and intercultural mediators, this article investigates differences in the ethical positioning of these two profiles. The results show that while the codes of ethics of community interpreters tend to emphasize impartiality, the documents defining the emerging profile of intercultural mediators position advocacy more prominently. Beyond the differences in ethical positioning, the article also considers other reasons for the formation of this new profile and outlines several challenges related to the partial overlap between the two profiles, which include distorted definitions of the interpreter’s competences and performance, conceptual confusion in the research literature, and mismatched expectations of language services consumers.

In Search of the Essential Competences for Overcoming Language Barriers in Public Services

“…Proponents of both sides recognize the need in the market and society for professionals whose job would be to help migrants access services which are offered in the languages of the host country and in which they are not proficient. But while proponents of intercultural mediators (Theodosiou and Aspioti 2015, Verrept 2019) largely reject community interpreters -claiming that they only transpose linguistic elements from one language into another, separating language from the cultural content of the communication, which, according to them, is the domain of the intercultural mediator -others, such as Pöchhacker ( 2008), Martín and Phelan (2010) and Pokorn and Mikolič Južnič (2020), for instance, reject such oversimplifications of the competences of community interpreters, but nevertheless acknowledge the need for both profiles. They argue that interpreting services should be offered by trained professionals (i.e., community interpreters), while other tasks, such as informing and assisting the migrants in accessing services and integrating in the host society, which involve mainly dyadic, not triadic (i.e., interpreted) communication, should be carried out by intercultural mediators.…”

“…Furthermore, Pöchhacker (2008) and Martín and Phelan (2010) argue that terminological indeterminacy reflects negatively on the professionalization of the two profiles. We believe that the difference between intercultural mediators and community interpreters should also not be boiled down just to a question of ethical positioning (Pokorn and Mikolič Južnič 2020).…”

“…As discussed in Pokorn and Mikolič Južnič (2020), however, the reasons for the emergence of this kind of understanding of a new profile of intercultural mediators seem to be much more complex, including the lack of trained interpreters for the languages of newly arrived migrants, the fight for dominance in the training of migrants' languages specialists and the sometimes unreasonable expectations of healthcare providers. However, there exists also an alternative understanding of the role and profile of intercultural mediators, where intercultural mediators are defined as integration facilitators, i.e., individuals who assist migrants when they lack cultural awareness and understanding of the system and, consequently, cannot access and benefit from quality basic social services, education, primary health care, fair trial and political participation in the host country (Martín and Phelan 2010;Pokorn, Viezzi, and Radanović Feldberg 2020, 11).…”

Interpreting is Interpreting: Why we need to leave behind interpreting settings to discover Comparative Interpreting Studies

“…One feature shared by all interpreted events is that the interpreting itself is simply a part of a wider process of meaning making toward a shared goal (Turner 2005). Side-lining interpreting settings as categories opens the way for researchers to explore how this process takes place and to find similarities in this process across contexts, perhaps even contexts that have not been previously deemed to be a part of interpreting proper, such as (inter)cultural mediation (Verrept 2008;Phelan and Martín 2010;Pokorn and Južnič 2020) and child language brokering (Antonini 2016;Napier 2017), although such extensions would be challenging and are beyond the scope of this article. Exploring the meaning-making process across contexts would necessarily mean zooming out from the work of individual interpreters and pre-defined settings to ask questions about meaning making in interpreting more generally.…”

“…The growth of a comparative strand of Interpreting Studies would encourage more diachronic studies of the development of interpreting practices across time and place, while the application of similar methods to synchronic studies of different instances of interpreting would allow the theorization of interpreting as a global practice. Recent work by Pokorn and Južnič (2020) has already shown how such synchronic studies can illuminate the fuzzy, or even contradictory, nature of boundaries between interpreting and related professions. At the most basic level, such theorization would begin to isolate and define the variables that are in play whenever interpreting takes place, rather than those that only apply in specific cases.…”