La FALDH está presente en citoplasma, núcleo y cloroplasto.

Within the participant group, one participant was a qualified professional BSL signer and one participant had received training to work with language interpreters (as part of a broader training day concerning diversity). Working with interpreters was characterised with uncertainty, and the participants alluded to the potential difficulties that this may entail. There were concerns about the potentiality for missed meaning, for example there was no guarantee that that the interpreter would understand the speakers’ (social worker and users’) intended meaning, since the social workers were absent from core communication processes. There were also a variety of interpreting styles amongst the interpreters employed. Some interpreters were found to interpret verbatim, others summarised content and were thought to extend instructions and offer advice to service users, beyond the instructions of the social worker. The variability that the social workers experienced raised uncertainty about interpreter-mediated encounters, particularly the possibility of miscommunication.

B1: in order for us to work with a family (LEP), we’re going to need to use

[translation and interpreting] agency, so if, if that fails and they’re not providing… good quality interpreters, when we might need them, then that’s obviously going to have a reflection on us.

The excerpt illuminates the earlier point and suggests that the variable quality of translation and interpretation services has an impact on the social workers’ delivery of services for the service user. This places interpreters in a tenuous position; on the one hand as a pragmatic instrument given their capacity to facilitate communication for people who do not share a mutual language. On the other hand, the interpreter is rendered an implicit threat, whose actions may generate difficulties and thus reflect poorly on the social workers and their relationship with the service users. This highlights the importance of the working

relationship between social workers and interpreters. In relation to this, a distinction can be made between a view of interpreters who work ‘for’ social workers or interpreters who work ‘with’ social workers. The former approach appears to be taken by participant B7.

158

B7: …I’ve found that interpreters () they’re not aware of mm our jobs – so why we do things the way we do. So they won’t be able to interpret the way that would be

reflective of you know, how we want the questions answered

The participant is of the view that interpreters have limited understanding about her role as a social worker. This implies that the working arrangement is disjointed, and the interpreters do not meet the social workers’ expectations. The social workers’ desire for questions and answers to be proffered in a particular way is indicative of a view that the interpreter works ‘for’ the social worker. The interpreter is therefore depicted as an external body, whose involvement is considered problematical. This highlights the interpreter’s role beyond the translation of words. The following excerpt illustrates how a social worker realises that the interpreter is integral to the relationship building and that she must work ‘with’ the interpreter in order to benefit the service user.

1.B2: …when I worked in (area) I had a boy who was a Bengali boy. He actually

2.appeared to be quite a humorous child erm but often his jokes were lost in 3.translation erm so the the interpreter and the ↑boy were building up quite a good

4.R: [°OK° [right

5.B2: relationship because of the humour that was being battered backwards and 6. forwards. And the interpreter always () let me know what the joke was and the 7. punchline and all of that but it lost in translation, so I would LAUGH () but

8.R: [mm [o(h)k [heh politely

9.B2: actually I didn’t get it () yeah. But you could tell that they were building up 10.quite a good relationship because, because they could engage in a one to one, 11.R: [OK

159 In this example, the interpreter is said to develop a ‘good’ relationship with a service user, and this highlights the redundancy of the social workers’ role, as she realises that rapport is

contingent upon a mutual language. It therefore appears that the interpreter is not a neutral body, as it appears that he does more than convey and retrieve messages from the social worker and child. The exchange of jokes between the interpreter and child suggests that the interpreter has autonomy to extend conversation. Despite jokes being translated for the social worker, she describes content as: ‘lost in translation’ (line 7) as contextual or cultural

understanding is absent. Her incapacity to participate in the jokes means that she is an onlooker to the relationship building between the child and interpreter. The participant follows social conventions (Foot, 1997), and laughs along (line 7) despite not understanding the jokes. Thus the act of laughing could be considered as a linguistic device, to signal approval for the continued relationship building, in the awareness that the social worker was dependent on the input of the interpreter to build relationships with the child. This example is indicative of the social worker working ‘with’ the interpreter. This echoes the work of

Pöchhacker (2000) who reports that familiarity was an important concept in relationship building between interpreter and practitioner, which could lead to the interpreter being granted greater autonomy to take the lead during interactions with clients. This example highlights that communication is more than the direct transfer of messages from speaker to listener (Sharon and Weaver, 1949).