Neutral, accurate language rendition is often not the only skill required for a communication mediator to provide effective cross-linguistic mediation. Laster and Taylor (1995) and Angelelli (2004) criticised interpreting services which only provide neutral language
hospital in Los Angeles found that patients who spoke through an interpreter perceived the clinicians as “less friendly, less respectful, and less concerned for them as a person” (Baker, Hayes & Fortier 1998: 1465), compared to the perceptions of clinicians held by patients who had not used an interpreter. The study indicated that interpreter-mediated cross-linguistic health communication involves complex social factors which affect the relationship between the speakers.
A comparative discourse analysis of monolingual and interpreter-mediated bilingual conversations suggested that in successful interpreter-mediated medical encounters, the interpreters were collaborative participants in the conversation (Davidson 2002).
Interpreters are speaking agents who are critically engaged in the process of making meaningful utterances that elicit the intended response from, or have the intended effect upon, the hearer, not a simple or thoughtless task. (ibid.: 1275)
In a paper presented at the Forum on Language Barriers to Care in September 1995, sponsored by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Chang and Fortier (1998) argued that the role of health care interpreters is not limited to neutral language rendition.
Interpreters are often called on to take different roles, including those of cultural mediator and advocate. These labels describe different types of interpretation and different roles for interpreters; in practice, both types and roles are often mixed. (1998: S7)
Professional interpreters are alive to challenges of these role expectations. In Australia, Butow and her colleagues (2012) conducted focus groups in Victoria and NSW with thirty professional interpreters working with cancer patients who spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek or Arabic.
Participants were… very clear about the role they were supposed to take in the consultation, which they saw principally as conveying information, ensuring understanding and being accurate, confidential and impartial... However, despite their role clarity, the interpreters described three broad dilemmas which faced them daily: (a) being accurate but also ensuring understanding; (b) translating only versus
cultural advocacy and sensitivity; (c) maintaining a professional distance versus providing support (ibid.: 237).
Dysart-Gale (2005) interviewed seventeen experienced interpreters in Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Serbian, Italian, Burmese and Turkish who work in two major cities in the central United States. The interviews explored work challenges faced by participating interpreters. The interpreters described the difficulties of navigating between their prescribed role as a neutral language conduit and responding to the actual communication needs of the patients and hospital staff (ibid.).
Frequently, interpreters interviewed at the hospital complained about being constrained by the conduit model from verbalizing questions that patients do not pose themselves, possibly because of culturally determined reluctance to question physicians (ibid.: 97-98)
Reviewing the implementation of codes of ethics for interpreters in the USA and
interpreters’ real-life experiences, Nicholson (1994) found that professional tenets in the codes were often incompatible with real-life situations. Nicholson argued that compared to the neutral conduit model, the ‘facilitator’ model proposed by Ashworth (1990), with reference to the cases of Japanese-English communication, may “increase the likelihood of mutual understanding” (ibid.: 83) because a facilitator “allows both sides to talk with each other (as opposed to at each other)” (original emphasis - ibid.: 83). Nicholson explained that the facilitator’s role is different from the traditional interpreter’s role in that it involves the processes of reflection and clarification.
[T]he facilitator employs (1) “reflection,” during which he/she “reinterprets
statements made by the American staff using a variety of English that is more likely comprehended by the Japanese staff” and (2) “clarification,” which is “similar to reflection” and involves elucidation (ibid.: 38).
The same dilemmas of navigating between the conduit role and recognising the contexts and needs of speakers or writers of language are also described by translators. Kuhiwczak (2007) reflected on this point in an analysis of ‘Holocaust testimonies’, noting the
disproportionate number that are written primarily in English or disseminated through English translations – not the first language of the victims or the perpetrators of this historical event. Kuhiwczak argued that the fact that survivors’ accounts are often represented in their second or third language obscures or simplifies their true stories.
Considering the fact that a majority of the victims came from Europe and that English was not for them their first language, it is surprising to see that in a huge body of writing devoted to trauma and witnessing, there is little attention paid to the question whether bilingualism, or often multilingualism plays any role in accounts given of the past... [The survivors’ lives are] acknowledged only as a backdrop, an unusual accent superimposed on the English phonetic pattern (2007: 67)
Kuhiwczak suggests that translation which is based on a one-sided cultural perspective is often insufficient to express the sentiment conveyed in the original language.
[Translators can make literature on the Holocaust compelling] by retaining often crucial Polish, Yiddish or German words to show the communication gaps and the function of language as an instrument of coercion, or by careful characterization in order to make sure that the victims belong to a shtetl and not to a small market town in southern England (ibid.: 71)
Cross-linguistic communication mediation involves the complex negotiation of subjectivities derived from different cultures, symbolic positions, and social structures. Greenhalgh, Robb and Scambler found that interpreting which does not go beyond neutral, grammatically faithful language rendition failed to “acknowledge the linguistic impossibility of direct translation from one language into another, and it ignored or marginalised critical
humanistic inputs such as intersubjectivity, support, and system navigation” (2006: 1182). Davidson also questioned the traditional conduit role by pointing to the independent agency of an interpreter in a cross-linguistic encounter.
[L]inguistic systems are not 'the same' in how [interpreters] convey information contextually… [interpreters] are themselves social agents and participants… in the discourse” (2000: 401).
A health care interpreter may also act as an institutional gatekeeper “who keep[s] the interview ‘on track’ and the physician on schedule” (Davidson 2000: 400). Their role may also involve being a “cultural broker” (Kaufert & Koolage 1984: 283).
In an analysis of the professionalisation of the occupation of interpreting, Rudvin (2007) pointed to the impacts of culture on the professional and social identities of the interpreter and the communication strategies which they adopt according to the context.
If [the interpreter’s] identity is primarily governed by the group rather than on an individual basis, his/her loyalty and impartiality will be determined by the group bond (ibid.: 61).
Rudvin argued that this is particularly applicable to Japanese culture (ibid.: 61). I have noted elsewhere in this thesis the collective self of Japanese people and its impact on their group- focused social identity (see Lebra 2004, Peak 1989). I referred to this notion in the
introduction of this thesis to explain the tendency for Japanese people to be highly conscious about whether their behaviour meets commonly held social expectations in the community. Rudvin also pointed to the gap in the general understanding of the role of an interpreter between Western culture and non-Western culture.
In a typically Western achievement-oriented, individualist culture the interpreter feels more comfortable in an ‘independent and neutral’ role, where the only aim of interpreting is to give an accurate account of the interlocutors’ utterances, and the interpreter does not serve the interests of either party (ibid.: 62)
Rudvin’s analysis suggested that there is a thin line between professionalism and
essentialism. It is possible to see interpreters’ professionalism based on this prescribed role as a legitimating excuse for essentialising cross-linguistic communication to the mechanical exchange of utterances composed in accordance with different grammatical rules.
Bahadır, an academic who is both a Turkish-English interpreter and an anthropologist, pointed to the in-between agency of communication mediators in cross-linguistic
communication. She argued that it is important for the mediator to have “the awareness of the multitude of different layers of identities and roles” (2004: 812).
[An interpreter] should be trained as an intercultural communication expert whose profession evolves around cultures and communication between persons belonging to these cultures (ibid.: 811)
Bahadır rejected the universality of the impartial, detached ideal of interpreters, which is often codified through codes of ethics. She argued that interpreters have a unique identity as in-between cultural mediators.
Interpreting in the sense of professional intercultural communication can also be seen as a ‘staging’ of both cultures plus a third one. Interpreters, too, are engaged in a borderline activity, producing other cultures against the background of their own cultures, and creating a new space, a third culture (ibid.: 816)
Arnold Van Gennep (1960) coined the term liminality to describe the ambiguous central moment of a ritual, where participants are ‘standing at the threshold’ of the reframing and restructuring of identity which the ritual fosters. The ritual as rite of passage comprises preliminal rites (rites of passage), liminal rites (rites of transition) and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation).
Moore (2015) used the notion of liminality in an observational study of a Korean-English interpreter who was mediating business negotiations in London. Moore drew on this concept to explain the position of an interpreter being “neither one thing nor the other; a mix of different, normally separate categories” (Moore 2015: 87). She noted that the interpreter gained power to negotiate between two social and cultural groups by maintaining a liminal position between Korean communities and British corporations in London. The liminal interpreter also had power to control the impression the speakers formed of each other (ibid.: 98-99). In other words, the interpreter was engaged in a liminal rite of transitioning the other speakers to a new way of understanding their interconnected selves in the communication.
The concept of liminality which Moore applied in her study (2015) may be closer to an extended notion used by Victor Turner (1967; 1969) than to Van Gennep’s original concept. Turner extended the application of Van Gennep’s original concept of liminality as a stage of transition in magico-religious ceremonies to an instrument of inquiry into broader social contexts.
Turner redefined liminality as “any type of stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized” (1969: 94), in which an entity is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (1969: 95). According to Turner (1969), society comprises the structures of different symbolic positions. A liminal subject is free from a “’structural’ type” (1969: 95) in which the subject is “expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social position in a system of such positions” (ibid.: 95).
Turner argued that since “the attributes of liminality… are necessarily ambiguous”, they are “expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions” (ibid.: 95). Using the example of hippies in modern Western society, Turner explained power which people who opt out of structure wield to manipulate values in society (ibid.: 112-113).