Interpreters in emergency wards: an empirical study of doctor-interpreter-patient interaction

This paper explores interpreting practice in the field of emergency medicine. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of tape-recorded interpreter-mediated encounters between the medical staff of an Italian hospital and English-speaking tourists. The specificity of the setting – an Accident & Emergency Ward – where patients are not members of a minority community, but feel nonetheless vulnerable because the emergency has occurred away from home, as well as the unusual profile of the interpreters who are employed on a seasonal basis as ‘administrative assistants’, make this study an atypical investigation into public service interpreting. Through the use of different theoretical approaches – from Fairclough’s distinction between powerful and non-powerful participants, to ten Have’s notion of phase-specific conversational patterns, to Hall’s theory of contexting – it is demonstrated that asymmetry in medical encounters is the product of a complex set of factors. More specifically, it is a shifting variable which is locally and interactionally determined through successive turns at talk by all interlocutors, doctor, patient and interpreter alike. The latter, in particular, is seen to behave as a full-fledged social actor who makes independent choices on the basis of his/her assessment of the goals and requirements of the ongoing activity.