Forms of Participation in a Mental Health Care Consultation with a Nonpresent Interpreter

ABSTRACT

Interpreter-mediated interactions via phone are becoming increasingly frequent, especially in medical settings. I examine one case of a mental care consultation with a nonpresent interpreter. My aim is to explore how the three participants—mental health practitioner, client, and nonpresent interpreter—use multimodal resources to manage the possible interactional relations among themselves. I will show how, at certain points, they use gaze and body orientation to integrate into the overall triadic interaction a series of exchanges between practitioner and client. The data are in Arabic and French with an English translation.

Notes

¹ Some papers address telephone interpreting using the term “remote interpreting.”

² The data were collected for the REMILAS (Refugees, Migrants and Their Languages in Healthcare Services) research project, funded by the French National Research Agency (2016–2019). This deals with obstacles to communication in refugees’ health and mental care consultations in France. All the data collected for this project were recorded with all the participants’ informed consent, and a set of ethical precautions, established in agreement with the legal services and ethical committees of the academic and health-care institutions concerned, were respected in the collection, analysis, storage, and publication of excerpts of the data. See http://www.icar.cnrs.fr/sites/projet-remilas/corpus/.

³ Data were collected by Anna Claudia Ticca and Emilie Jouin-Chardon.

⁴ This type of interpreting taking place in social situations is called “dialogue interpreting.” Its main features, as defined in Baker (1998), are that it is bidirectional, carried out consecutively, and occurs turn by turn or at least small unit by small unit.

⁵ Nevertheless, it is far from being the most frequent in all the interpreted consultations, as many papers have shown (see among others Bolden, 2000; Gavioli, 2015; Traverso, 2002; Wadensjö, 1998).

⁶ See Ticca and Traverso (2015) for an analysis of the use of prosodic cues in an interaction with an interpreter who works without seeing the doctor’s actions accompanying her talk (while examining a patient in a medical consultation).

⁷ Counting on one’s hand in Syria is done starting with the little finger (not the thumb), so to display “3,” one shows the three fingers from the little one.

⁸ We assume that this form of duplication of the participation framework is different from what can happen with an on-site interpreter when the patient and the doctor have dual exchanges in parallel with the translator’s talk. In this latter case, were exchanges such as those we have described to occur, they would necessarily affect the interpreter’s conduct, since s/he would have visual access to them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the French National Research Agency as part of the project Refugees, migrants and their languages in health care services (2016–2019).