Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ISBN 978-1-1905763-35-1
BARBARA SCHOUTEN
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
JONATHAN ROSS
Boazii University, Turkey
RENA ZENDEDEL
Utrecht University, Netherlands
LUDWIEN MEEUWESEN
Utrecht University, Netherlands
Abstract. Between 2008 and 2010, academics in five European
countries collaborated on an EU-funded project, Training Intercultural and Bilingual Competences in Health and Social Care
(TRICC). Among TRICCs aims was to deepen understanding of
informal interpreting through eliciting the perspectives of interpreters themselves. To identify commonalities and differences in
the experiences, attitudes and practices of informal interpreters
in distinct settings, the Dutch and Turkish partners interviewed 15
young migrant adults in the Netherlands and 15 Kurdish speakers
in Istanbul respectively, asking them about emotional and technical aspects of interpreting, and about their expectations and roles,
communicative challenges and actions. Thematic analysis of the 30
interviews corroborated the findings of previous research namely,
that informal interpreters are highly visible, use diverse communicative strategies, adopt various roles, and occasionally speak as
primary interlocutors. Noticeable differences between the two sets
of interpreters included their attitudes towards interpreting and
their preferences for informal versus professional interpreting,
both of which can be better understood in the light of the cultural
backgrounds of the interpreters and the institutional and political
frameworks within which they interpret. This comparative study
appears to support Angelellis (2004a) claim that interpreted events
are heavily influenced by socio-political and cultural contexts.
ISSN 1355-6509
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their primary education, and 33% of this group have limited or no competence
in Turkish, with women making up 90% of the total (Grsel et al. 2009:3, 6).
Since many healthcare providers, including those of Kurdish origin, do not
speak Kurdish, patients limited proficiency in Turkish frequently results in
the need for interpretation. In a survey conducted in 2008 and 2009 among
253 doctors in the region of Diyarbakr, the most populous city in the East of
Turkey, just under half of the doctors questioned reported having to seek the
help of a member of staff or companion of the patient in order to communicate
with the patient (Diyarbakr Tabip Odas 2009).
To deal with the above-mentioned communication problems, governments
and NGOs have sought to expand the provision of professional interpreting
and advocacy services. In the Netherlands, medical interpreting and translation
services have been organized by the government since 1976 and provided for
free since 1983. As the Dutch healthcare inspectorate regards the use of professional interpreters as the golden standard, and the Law on Medical Treatment
(1995) places the onus on healthcare providers to communicate in a language
the patient can understand, ethnic minority patients in the Netherlands with poor
language proficiency in Dutch have the right to a professional interpreter free
of charge. The expenses are covered by the Ministry of Health, Social Welfare
and Sport, and the interpreting is provided by the Dutch Interpreter and Translator Service, which supplies professionally-trained interpreters working in over
130 languages. In daily practice, however, Dutch healthcare providers do not
frequently deploy these professional interpreters, mainly because they are not
familiar with the service. Instead, they tend to make use of family members and
acquaintances the patients bring along to help them communicate with the doctor (Meeuwesen and Twilt 2011:15). Furthermore, in the coming years, the use
of these informal interpreters is likely to increase, because the free provision of
professional interpreting services will soon be scrapped. In a letter dated 25 May
2011, the Dutch Minister and Secretary of State responsible for health informed
the Lower House that all funding for interpretation and translation services in
healthcare would be withdrawn from the beginning of 2012. The main argument used to justify these cuts is that patients/clients (or their representatives)
are responsible for their own command of the Dutch language (Schippers and
Veldhuijzen van Zanten-Hyllner 2011:4).
Whereas in the Netherlands official policy had aimed (at least on paper)
to cater to the needs of inhabitants with limited proficiency in Dutch, up until
the 1990s the Turkish state tried to solve the problem of inadequate communication between Turkish speakers and speakers of other mother tongues
simply by insisting that the latter learn and use Turkish. This policy reflected
the civic nationalist ideology of the Republic, which was encapsulated in the
slogan One state, one nation, one flag, one language. The policy of stringent
The East of Turkey will subsequently be used to encapsulate the geographical regions
of Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia.
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Health and Social Care (TRICC). The objective of TRICC was to develop,
run and evaluate training programmes and materials for people who had served
or were likely to serve as informal interpreters, as well as for the healthcare
workers and patients with whom they interact. At the same time, TRICC aimed
to draw attention to the perceived inappropriateness of informal interpreting
by minors in particular. Early on in the project, the Dutch partner carried out
a set of structured interviews with informal interpreters. Meanwhile, the Turkish partner was conducting preliminary library and fieldwork on the hitherto
unresearched area of informal interpreting in Turkey, consulting health professionals, patients and interpreters in the East of Turkey. When the Turkish
team shared their findings with their Dutch and other partners in TRICC, they
noted some interesting similarities and differences. To explore them more
thoroughly and systematically, the Turkish group decided to adapt and apply
the questionnaire their Dutch partners had used, in order to gather data that
would enable a more structured comparison of the experiences, practices and
attitudes of informal interpreters in these two countries.
The present paper reports on these data, documenting and discussing both
the parallels and dissimilarities between informal interpreters in these territories at opposite ends of Europe. Our rationale for comparing the two sets
of interpreters, who perform their tasks in such different settings, is to trace
the impact of the socio-political and cultural context on informal interpreters
and on the doctor-patient consultations interpreted by them. Since the 1990s,
a strong tendency has emerged in the literature on interpreting, especially on
community interpreting, to consider the role of interpreters in relation to the
social contexts in which they operate (Angelelli 2004a, Berk-Seligson 1990,
Davidson 2000, Hsieh 2006, Roy 2000, Wadensj 1992). Such research has
been very effective in demonstrating the social and political situatedness of
what Claudia Angelelli terms Interpreted Communicative Events (2004a:8),
but the interpreters whose actions are analyzed tend to be professional interpreters, not informal ones. Moreover, these studies invariably focus on a
single territory and rarely attempt to compare the experiences of interpreters
in different geographical and cultural settings. Even Angelellis Revisiting the
Interpreters Role: A Study of Conference, Court and Medical Interpreters in
Canada, Mexico, and the United States (2004b) reveals surprisingly little about
the relationship between the role definitions of the 293 interpreters surveyed
and the conditions in the country in which they live and work, despite the
fact that these three countries have quite different demographics and distinct
political traditions, histories, institutions and norms with respect to interpreting. Our study aims to address this gap in interpreting research.
Previous research on informal interpreting in medical settings has
largely involved critical analysis of the (recorded) performances of informal
interpreters or discussion of the experiences of health workers and patients who
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rely on these interpreters. The first line of research invariably documents the
negative effects of informal interpreting on communication and on practical
and clinical outcomes. For instance, it has been noted that interpreting errors
are common (Flores et al. 2003), crucial information is lost (Bhrig and
Meyer 2004, Cambridge 1999), important linguistic and discursive features
of the communication are altered by interpreters (Aranguri et al. 2006), and
quality of clinical care is compromised (Karliner et al. 2007). Results of the
second line of research partly reflect these negative effects by commonly
documenting negative experiences from the perspective of healthcare providers
(Hornberger et al. 1997, Pchhacker 2000, Rosenberg et al. 2007), in particular
when children are used as informal interpreters (Cohen et al. 1999). Patients
themselves report more varied experiences, ranging from having more trust
in informal interpreters as compared to formal ones (Edwards et al. 2005)
to preferring professional interpreters because they offer a higher quality of
service (MacFarlane et al. 2009, Ngo-Metzger et al. 2003).
Although these two lines of research have provided valuable insights into the
practice of informal interpreting in healthcare settings, some crucial elements
have so far been neglected. For one thing, we know remarkably little about this
area from the perspective of the interpreters themselves. With the exception of
a few isolated studies (Green et al. 2005, Rosenberg et al. 2008, Valds 2003),
little has been published on how informal interpreters working in medical settings perceive their own roles and performances. In the present article, therefore,
we focus on the interpreters themselves. However, as mentioned earlier, rather
than offering a decontextualized and deterritorialized analysis of interpreters
responses, we aim to examine the situatedness of interactions between healthcare
providers, patients and interpreters in distinct socio-political contexts. In addition, since it is widely recognized that the diverging cultural backgrounds of the
parties involved can have considerable influence on the medical communication
process (Schouten and Meeuwesen 2006:21), we will scrutinize how the cultural
backgrounds of informal interpreters impact on the interpreting situation. At the
same time, we are interested in seeing whether there may nevertheless exist more
universal patterns of behaviour and discourse that stem from the particularities
of the situation where an untrained volunteer interprets in a medical setting for
a patient often the interpreters relative and a health professional.
2. Research design
For the sample in the Netherlands, we attempted to gather data from 20 young
migrant adults through personal contacts and a snowballing method. The main
criterion for inclusion was that they had experience in informal interpreting
as children (at least before the age of 19) and/or currently interpreted on a
regular basis. As we strove to gain a broad picture of the contexts and issues
present in informal interpreting in medical settings, no criteria were set in
terms of their ethnic background; in addition, we approached both men and
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mean age at which respondents had started interpreting was around 13, with the
range being between 4.5 and 21, although most (9 out of 15) started at some
point between 11 and 16. The interviewees had been interpreting for an average
of more than 15 years. Similarly to the Dutch sample, there was great variation
in the frequency with which respondents interpret, with the students generally
only interpreting when they return to their hometowns in the summer, and the
two housewives interpreting in different contexts on an almost daily basis. Seven
of the interviewees said that they had only interpreted for older female relatives,
while eight reported assisting both male and female relatives. Eight respondents
(i.e. around half of the sample) mentioned cases where they had interpreted for
strangers they met at the hospital or even on the way to the hospital.
The data we gathered from the interviews are accounts of the issues our
respondents chose to talk about, guided by a broad topic list (see Table 1 for a summary), to ensure that themes known to be relevant from the literature on informal
interpreting were discussed. Interviews, lasting about 45 minutes, were thus held
in a semi-structured in-depth format, to leave enough room for the respondents to
tell their own stories, although themes were discussed in the same order in every
interview. The questions addressed their background, personal history of interpreting, experiences of and feelings about interpreting (as well as feelings reported
by those they interpreted for), roles, strategies and actions in the triad, and other
emotional and technical aspects of their performances as informal interpreters. The
resulting corpus of 30 interviews was subjected to a thematic content analysis. The
most common or striking themes and issues are outlined below.
Language and family background
Which languages do you speak at home, at the doctors office, with
friends, etc.?
How proficient are you in these languages?
How often do you speak these languages?
For which family members have you interpreted?
Do other members of your family interpret?
Interpreting experiences: general
From what age have you been interpreting and for whom?
In which situations?
Are there differences between these situations? If so, why?
Technical aspects of interpreting
Do you consider yourself a good interpreter?
Are there specific topics that you find harder to interpret than others?
Do you always succeed in interpreting, and if not, when and why does it
go wrong?
And what goes well?
Can you describe a situation in which miscommunication occurred? Why
did this happen and how did you solve it?
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position concurs with the policy backed by activists and supporters of the former Peace
and Democracy Party (BDP), the most popular party in many areas of the East of Turkey. The
same idea underlies the efforts of the Diyarbakr Chamber of Medicine, who are engaged in
various projects to develop Kurdish as a language of medicine and to improve the Kurdish
competence of doctors working in the region. In 2009 the Chamber published a book, Krte
Anamnez / Anamneza bi Kurmanc (Anamnesis in Kurdish), which presents Kurmanji and
Turkish versions of the questions general practitioners and specialists will need when taking
a patients history (Blbl et al. 2009). This was followed in 2010 by the publication of a
manual for obtaining informed consent from Kurmanji-speaking patients.
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their responsibility to take care of them. In the Turkish case too, providing
interpretation was regarded very much as part of everyday family life. Talking about interpreting as a child, one woman commented, You see it like
any other request, like Take this glass to the kitchen and bring an ashtray
something usual normal a striking illustration of how interpreting is
lumped together with the various other tasks children in Turkish and Kurdish
societies are expected to perform for their seniors. This concurs with the finding of Rosenberg et al. concerning various family interpreters in Canada, for
whom [i]nterpreting is just one of many family [sic] roles family interpreters
carry out (2007:92).
Moreover, ten of the Dutch-speaking interpreters and seven of those in
Turkey said that they actually derived satisfaction from helping people through
interpreting. One of the latter, who grew up in a small village where very few
people spoke Turkish, emphasized that being able to interpret heightened his
status within the family and community and made him feel rather special. Other
positive consequences mentioned were the fact that the interviewees had the
opportunity to improve their own social, communicative and linguistic skills:
It is instructive. . You learn specific words you never use, for instance in
Russian or the other way around: I know the word in Dutch, but I dont
know how to say it in Russian .... It was instructive to [interpret].
3.2 Communication and attitudes
Twenty-two fragments in the Dutch interviews refer directly to the medical
communication process: 11 in positive terms, 11 in negative terms. In general,
the interpreters in the Netherlands commented positively on their experience of
communicating with general practitioners. Most of them were patients of the
same GPs as their parents, so the family had established a relationship of trust
with their doctor. In contrast, the negative fragments refer to communicating
with medical specialists, with whom such a relationship is absent. According
to the Dutch interviewees, specialists are impatient, use too much medical
jargon, and seem to be annoyed by the fact that the interpreted communication
takes up too much time.
The interviewees in Turkey pointed to three kinds of responses from doctors.
Nine interviewees had not personally experienced any uneasiness or aggressive
demeanour on the part of doctors when it became clear that the patient could
not speak Turkish and that the interviewee was there to interpret. However, two
respondents felt that the doctor was reluctant to communicate with them, giving
the impression that he or she was thinking Ive got enough on my plate without
having to deal with you lot, as one interviewee put it. The remaining four interviewees mentioned occasions when they had actually ended up arguing with
doctors: in two of these instances, the interpreter believed the doctor was not
giving the patient the attention they deserved, whilst in the other two the doctor
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simply insisted that the patient address him or her in Turkish, even though it
was patently impossible for them to do so. Notwithstanding these quite extreme
examples of conflict, the picture the respondents paint of doctors responses is
probably very different from what one would have witnessed in Turkish hospitals
and clinics twenty years ago, when doctors who communicated with patients in
Kurdish faced persecution (Maviolu 2010:20).
Turning to interpreters perceptions of the process of communicating with
the patient, ten Dutch-speaking interpreters reported negative experiences.
They felt that patients demanded too much from them, for instance by getting them to repeat the same information over and over, or by asking them to
translate information which was, in the interpreters opinion, irrelevant. They
also sensed that patients were frustrated and distrustful, feelings that stemmed
from them being entirely dependent on the interpreter. As for the interpreters in
Turkey, although ten claimed that they had a good rapport with the patient during the consultation, four admitted that they often found elderly relatives rather
stubborn, demanding and sceptical. One respondent related the story of when
she had gone to see an eye specialist with her grandmother-in-law, who was
hoping to have an operation to correct her sight. When the respondent relayed
the doctors judgement that such an operation was too risky given the patients
age, the grandmother-in-law accused the interpreter of deliberately adding this
message in order to avoid the costs of such an operation. Another interpreter
similarly recalled being accused by her own grandmother, who lived with her,
of making up the doctors advice that she diet in order to save on food expenses.
Such examples reveal the potential for problems when the informal interpreter
has multiple and possibly conflicting interests with respect to the patient a
situation all the more likely when the two are connected by the strong bonds of
an extended family. As is evident from the two examples, things become more
complex still when the patient has little grasp of health issues.
Suggestions made by interpreters in the Netherlands to improve doctorinterpreter-patient communication ranged from doctors allocating more time to
these triadic conversations and showing more concern for their patients, to organizing formal interpreters in their practices, for instance by having them available
a couple of hours each week. For two-thirds (10) of the interviewees in Turkey,
the optimal solution was that Kurdish-speaking doctors should be employed or
Turkish doctors coming to the area should learn Kurdish. For the most part,
their prime demand was not that the Turkish state should provide professional
interpreters but that the indigenous population should be able to communicate
with doctors in their own language. As one student put it rather passionately,
With regards to areas outside the East with large Kurdish populations, three interviewees
suggested that Kurdish-speaking doctors could be deliberately hired there and Kurdish
speakers would naturally gravitate towards such doctors. For a real-life example of the
latter-mentioned phenomenon, see Maviolu (2010), a portrait of a Kurdish-speaking
doctor working in Istanbul.
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For example, a child, or the husband of a woman who has come to see a psychiatrist
about her marital problems.
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Almost all the interpreters in the Netherlands (13) stated that they would rather
accompany their family members themselves, as they feel they are better able
to do the job than professional interpreters, because they have firsthand knowledge of their relatives medical problems: I know about the whole situation,
while a [professional] interpreter doesnt know my mother at all. He or she
does the job and goes home. But I know my mothers complaints and when
she suffers from them.
In marked contrast to their counterparts in the Netherlands, no fewer than
ten of the respondents in Turkey looked positively on the possibility of trained
professionals interpreting for non-Turkish-speakers, although, for the most
part, they saw this as a second-best alternative to monolingual communication
in Kurdish between the doctor and the patient. They thought that interpretation
by a person appointed by the state an option that does not currently exist in
the Turkish health system11 would be more reliable than interpreting done
by family members. Two interpreters acknowledged that their seniors would
be reluctant to divulge intimate and potentially embarrassing information to a
stranger, but even more interviewees were of the opinion that those for whom
they interpret would have more confidence in officially trained and appointed
interpreters. Five interviewees felt that patients mistrusted their capabilities
and motives, with some recalling specific occasions when an elderly patient
did not believe their junior was fully and accurately recounting in Kurdish
what the doctor had said in Turkish. One explanation proposed for this by
an interpreter is that, for older generations, in rural areas of the Southeast in
particular, being able to speak Turkish seemed like a fantastic achievement,
one that they found difficult to associate with their own children.
3.3 Role(s) of the interpreter
While interviewees did tend to resort to fairly hackneyed metaphors of neutral
and objective
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I once went to the doctor with this old lady and [the doctor] said: I
only give a referral if she suffers because of her heart at night ....
But the old lady said, I dont have any pain at night. Then I said
to her in my own language, You do have pain at night, dont you?.
Then she said, Yes?. I said, You just told me that you have pain at
night. Because she desperately wanted a scan of her heart, but the
doctor did not want to do that, so I was thinking: I feel sorry for her,
lets just do that, maybe there is something wrong. But then the old
lady said, It hardly hurts at night. I said, Just say you are in pain
at night!. Because I knew what the doctor had just said to me, you
know, so I said: Yes, she is in pain at night, but not as much as during
the day. And then he said, Okay, if she is suffering at night, then I
will write a referral.
In the interviews in both countries, we also heard about several cases where
an interpreter claimed to have carried out rather more subtly selective and
manipulative renditions in order to ensure that, within the limited time allowed
by the medical interaction, the uneducated and elderly patient received what
the interpreter believed to be the appropriate information about the illness
and also acted in the way recommended by the doctor. For instance, one of
the Zazaki-speaking interpreters in Turkey tended to use general expressions
to render the doctors comments on the severity and consequences of the
illnesses, partly not to shock the patients and partly because his language supposedly lacked the terms needed to describe a medical condition in detail. He
translated fairly technical diagnoses with sentences like Theres no need to
worry, Its a very simple problem, or This needs to be taken seriously.
Another respondent in Turkey conceded that he had sometimes exaggerated
the warnings or advice given by the doctor, since his father was not taking
sufficient care of his health. For example, when a doctor said You shouldnt
eat red meat, in Kurmanji this became, The doctor says you mustnt eat meat
under any circumstances (our emphases).
Several interpreters reported leaving large chunks of discourse uninterpreted. This occurred when the interpreter deemed the patients talk redundant
and (in the Dutch case) the doctors time ran out. Indeed, interpreters in both
countries mentioned time limitations as an important factor determining
translation strategies. One Zazaki speaker, for example, noted that a doctor in
a state hospital only assigns two or three minutes to each patient; since this
is not enough to relay everything the patient has said, the interpreter presents
a refined and succinct summary of the necessary points based on what
the interpreter has been told by the patient at home.
As is evident from the above examples, many of the interpreters we interviewed went far beyond offering a more or less literal rendition of what the
interlocutors said to one another: they reported omitting, adding and modifying
information, exaggerating or toning down, and involving themselves actively
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in the conversation to make sure patients felt understood and received the care
they needed. In the Netherlands, 12 out of the 15 respondents reported undertaking such interventionist actions at one time or the other. Besides seeing
themselves as competent translators, these interpreters perceive their roles as
being advocates for the patient and persons of trust to whom the patient can
turn for advice, mediation and support.
In Turkey, three interpreters professed having tried to present a wordfor-word rendition of what other interlocutors said. In several cases, this
strategy apparently led to communication difficulties, since the interpreter
provided a literal Turkish rendition of a Kurdish idiomatic expression used
to describe the symptoms of an illness a rendition which the doctor then
struggled to decipher. Alternatively, when faced with a term in Turkish for
which they did not know the Kurdish equivalent, four interpreters simply
repeated the Turkish word one reported pointing to the relevant part of the
body while doing so an effective strategy (according to two interviewees)
since the patients had some knowledge of basic Turkish medical vocabulary.
On balance, the proportion of interviewees in Turkey who reported taking
steps such as paraphrasing, explaining terms and interjecting questions was
somewhat lower than in the Netherlands (8 out of 15). All the same, at least
four Turkish interpreters acknowledged trying to correct mistreatment or
abuse, as the (US) National Council on Interpreting in Healthcare defines
advocacy (NCIHC 2005:16), when they felt the doctor was not behaving appropriately towards the patient. The most striking example of this was when
a young woman, who had her own appointment at a hospital, witnessed a
doctor shouting at an old Kurdish woman and telling her that he would not
treat her if she did not speak Turkish. At this point, the young woman came
over to the patient and offered to interpret for her, while putting it to the doctor in no uncertain terms that what he had said contradicted the Hippocratic
Oath and that she would complain about him to the hospital management and
other authorities.
4. Discussion of the findings
Turning to examine the common threads in the responses of interviewees in
the Netherlands and Turkey, a glance at our data on the technical aspects of
informal interpreting and on the roles of the interpreter confirms the oftenmade observation (Arranguri et al. 2006, Flores et al. 2003, Meyer 1998,
Twilt 2007) that informal interpreters are even less likely than their professional counterparts to function as invisible, neutral conduits who more or less
interpret word-for-word. Although several of our interviewees, in particular
the ones in Turkey but also a few in the Netherlands, claim that they (strive
to) translate literally between doctors and patients, probably because of a misguided view that machine-like interpreting is the ideal, their stories clearly
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to communicate on their own. In contrast, some interpreters in the Netherlands, including those of Turkish origin, whose identifications of citizenship
are multidimensional and who have inevitably taken on traits of the more
individualistically-inclined indigenous culture alongside those of their heritage culture (Phalet and Swyngedouw 2002), expressed irritation towards the
demands of their parents and frustration with having to spend time and effort
assisting their relatives. They also mentioned they wished that their parents or
other family members for whom they interpret would learn Dutch.
Rather than applying merely a cultural model to understand such differences, though, we also need to see the interpreters professed thoughts
and actions within the framework of their specific political and institutional
constellations. The Kurdish-speaking interviewees non-judgemental approach
to patients who cannot speak Turkish, for instance, is no doubt linked to their
generally strong ethnic affiliation and to the accompanying belief that the onus
should be on doctors to speak to their patients in Kurdish. As for the impact
of institutional differences, the existence of the GP system in the Netherlands
might explain why Dutch-speaking interpreters appeared far more satisfied
with their encounters with GPs than with their meetings with specialists.
Like their clients, they have probably built up a relationship of trust with the
GP following frequent visits, whether as interpreters or patients. In Turkey,
however, a system of family doctors was only established across the country
in November 2010. Prior to that, and even now, it was (and is) very common
for patients to refer themselves to the relevant department in the hospital. This
system meant that patients and interpreters had less likelihood of coming into
contact with the same doctor and thus building trust, unless they visited the
same department in the hospital on a regular basis.
Whereas our interviewees and their relatives in the Netherlands appeared
to prefer informal over professional interpreting, in Turkey the opposite was
the case. There, the option of a professional service provided by individuals
trained for the job appears to be relatively attractive to people who have only
ever experienced interpretation done by their relatives and acquaintances.12
At the same time, the availability of professional interpreting services in
the Netherlands and their absence in Turkey might well have influenced the
manner in which the two sets of respondents interpreted. As has been noted,
the interpreters in the Netherlands expressed greater satisfaction with their
performances and recalled deploying methods that suggest a quite serious and
competent approach to their interpreting work. About half of the interviewees
reported endeavouring to enhance communication and understanding between
parties by taking along dictionaries, making drawings, recapping information,
In a survey conducted among 54 patients at two Southeastern Anatolian state hospitals
in 2009, 48% of respondents rated the interpreting they had received not very successful
while 15% thought it was unsuccessful, leaving just 47% who were satisfied to some
degree (Ross and Dereboy 2009).
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explicitly checking patients understanding, and repeating the same information several times. In the interviews from Turkey, we find relatively more
cases where interpreters offered meaningless word-for-word renditions or
supplied information independently without indicating they were doing so.
To be sure, it is quite likely that the Dutch-speaking interpreters recourse to
such measures primarily reflects factors such as a higher educational level
and greater competence in both languages. However, even though none of the
interviewees made a concrete link between their experiences of professional
interpreting and their own interpreting performances, it may be speculated
that the interpreters who employed such methods had witnessed, or heard
about, the way professional interpreters did their job and were aware that effective interpreting required a variety of communicative techniques and was
more than just linguistic recoding, the latter being what many of the Kurdish
speakers seemingly thought.
The attitudes of the two sets of interviewees on the question of informal
versus professional interpreting differed in another notable way. Whereas one
of the main objections to professional interpreting mentioned by respondents
in the Netherlands was that, in this kind of arrangement, another outsider
besides the doctor was party to the intimate details of the patient, the interviewees in Turkey thought quite differently; they predicted that they and their
clients would feel more comfortable if an outsider were there with the doctor
than if the interpreter were a family member a view that is arguably rooted
in cultural conceptions of what is acceptable and unacceptable for people
to talk about in the presence of younger relatives and/or of relatives of the
opposite sex. As one respondent put it, Us Anatolian folk, and especially us
Kurds, are much more conservative. A woman a mother even if shes
a hundred years old, cant speak about some subjects comfortably with her
children. Theres no way my sister can do that.
5. Conclusion
This small-scale study offers some rare insights into the experiences,
attitudes and behaviours of informal interpreters from the perspective of
the interpreters themselves. Some points to emerge from the interviews
were common to respondents in both the Netherlands and Turkey, as
well as familiar from the literature on non-professional interpreting. As
such, they suggest the existence of common, cross-national tendencies in
informal interpreting in medical settings, a possibility worthy of exploring
more thoroughly in future research on this topic (see below). Besides
common features, we also identified differences in the feelings, thoughts and
practices reported by respondents in the two territories. Among these were the
contrasting attitudes towards professional interpreting services, the greater
use of quasi-professional strategies by respondents in the Netherlands, and
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JONATHAN ROSS
Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Boazii University,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey.
jonathan.ross@boun.edu.tr
RENA ZENDEDEL
Vrije Universiteit Medical Centre, PO Box 7057, 1007 MB Amsterdam, The
Netherlands. r.zendedel@vumc.nl
LUDWIEN MEEUWESEN
Interdisciplinary Social Science Department, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, de Uithof, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. l.meeuwesen@uu.nl
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