Non-professional volunteer interpreting as an institutionalized practice in healthcare: a study on interpreters’ personal narratives

Abstract

This article discusses the process of institutionalization of a migrantoriented NGO where volunteers work as non-professional interpreters and where this had led to the integration of volunteer interpreting services in two hospitals in the Costa del Sol region in southern Spain. It explores the processes of socialization of volunteers and institutionalization of interpreters, leading to the development of an official NGO, drawing on the personal narratives of volunteers collected through focus groups and participant observation. The article begins by looking at the early stages of socialization of volunteers, through which they internalize the field structures and a series of dispositions shaped by empathy and compassion, resulting in volunteers adopting different positions available to them such as interpreters, caretakers and patient advocates. After the initial process of socialization, a process of institutionalization was requested by the regional government for the official establishment of the NGO. Drawing up the constitution of the now official NGO entailed the bureaucratization of the volunteers’ position as interpreters, which provided them with a series of assets and the legitimization of their activity as institutional agents. This study demonstrates how in this particular case volunteer non-professional interpreting became essential for the institutions in which the services are provided. The volunteer interpreters of this NGO are now legitimate institutional agents with a strong degree of professional autonomy that allows them to adopt a series of positions that belong to the domain of intercultural mediators and cultural brokers.

The needs of healthcare interpreting students: A field survey on healthcare interpreting didactics

“…Martín-Otty and Abril-Martí (2002, p. 56) documented that healthcare interpreters were often forced to carry out activities for which they were not trained, such as filling in patients' documents, accompanying them in their journey through the healthcare system, or even making judgments about their illnesses and treatments. Despite the developments in the profession, these practices are still present in Spanish hospitals (Aguilar- Solano, 2015) and will reappear in the discussion section of this paper. Consequently, the lack of boundaries that characterises healthcare interpreting compromises the impartiality and ethics of the interpreters and greatly affects their job.…”

Horizontal methodologies in community interpreting studies: Conducting research with Latin American service users in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…The field’s inability to move past the conduit model can be understood in relation to the concept of professional habitus, defined as “a specific predisposition, a way of thinking, which is in harmony with the structures of the professional field in which the agent is situated” (Aguilar Solano, 2012, p. 39). The conduit model of communication and the tenet of invisibility imposed by social conventions have helped develop a translatorial habitus tending towards subservience to translation norms.…”

Ethics, accuracy, and interpreting in social settings

“…Finally, the fourth line of research encompasses the role of non-professional interpreters in the PSI setting (Aguilar-Solano 2015;Boéri 2010;Martínez-Gómez 2015a, 2015bMayoral Asensio 2012;Olohan 2014;Pérez-González 2010;Susam-Sarajeva and Pérez-González 2012). Particularly relevant are those studies that relate, contrast, and reflect on the similarities and differences between the figure of the intercultural mediator and that of the interpreter in public services.…”