Professional interpreters and their critical role in ensuring communication with other-language speaking patients

Abstract

In our current societies, people from different backgrounds and cultures who speak different languages live together. This rich mixture of cultures and languages also implies some challenges for the functioning of and access to public services, including healthcare, as people who do not speak the official language of the place they live in have the right to access public services in the same conditions as native speakers. The barriers raised by linguistic and cultural disparity become even more obvious when healthcare is considered from a humanistic perspective, as language barriers in healthcare very frequently lead to a lower quality in health services, worse patient health outcomes and greater treatment costs. It has already been proved, however, that the best remedy to overcome these language and culture-based communicative problems is to resort to professional interpreters. This contribution describes a set of case studies that have been extracted from a corpus of real conversations recorded from medical consultations with patients who did not speak the language of healthcare providers. Our aim is to discuss how healthcare interpreters work (and how they should work) in order for communication to be improved and assistance to be enhanced through the intervention of professional interpreters.