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ABSTRACT
This article examines the professional boundaries and obstacles encountered by Eritrean graduates of a medical interpreter course in Israel. Through a series of personal interviews held about a year after their graduation, we identified professional and personal boundaries as a recurring theme. Drawing on the inspiring work of Erving Goffman, we discuss the tension between their “normative roles” and “typical roles.” By deploying two heuristic two-way typologies—in reference to the service provider or the patient, and in reference to formal or informal interpreting settings—we propose that the tension between the normative and the typical manifests most clearly within formal interpreting settings and vis-à-vis the service providers, and is least present outside formal settings and vis-à-vis the patients. Recognizing that the role of the interpreter tends to extend well beyond its formal setting, we conclude by reflecting on how the circumstances of marginalization and lack of support—incurred by the Israeli government’s intention to frustrate asylum seekers and thwart their struggle for recognition as refugees—compels the graduates to extend their services and serve as brokers, counsellors and guides in trying to help their compatriots navigate the ostensibly inhospitable system they confront.
Notes
1. Brah, Criptographies of Diaspora, 198.
2. Leanza, “Roles of Community Interpreters,” 186–88.
3. Goldman, Amin, and Macpherson, “Language and Length of Stay”; Hampers and McNulty, “Professional Interpreters and Bilingual Physicians.”
4. Bischoff and Denhaerynck, “What Do Language Barriers Cost?” 251.
5. Bancroft, “The Strategic Mediation Model”; Cross Cultural Health Care Program, “What Is Medical Interpreting?”
6. Corsellis, “Training Interpreters,” 166–67.
7. Tate and Turner, “The Code and the Culture.”
8. Goffman, Asylums.
9. Ingram, “Underlife in a Baptist Church,” 138.
10. Wadensjö, Interpreting as Interaction.
11. Berk and Galvan, “How People Experience,” 544.
12. Ibid., 549.
13. Streeck and Thelen, eds., Beyond Continuity, 25.
14. Inghilleri, “Mediating Zones of Uncertainty,” 74.
15. Interestingly, Inghilleri recommends that countering the professional weakness emerging from these multiple “zones of uncertainty” requires greater emphasis on interpreters’ professionalism, including the provision of high quality, formally-accredited interpreter training (ibid., 82).
16. Yacobi, “‘Let Me Go to the City,’” 57.
17. Ingram, “Underlife in a Baptist Church,” 149.
18. ASSAF, “Asylum Seekers from Eritrea and Sudan.”
19. Knesset Research and Information Center, Health Arrangements (Hebrew).
20. See Galia Sabar and Shiri Tenenboim’s “‘We must do something instead of just watch’:
The First Medical Interpreter Training Course for Eritrean Asylum Seekers in Israel,” in this volume.
21. Although there are no institutionalized vocational or academic MI training programs in Israel, since Citation2006 some training programs were offered to specific organizations in face-to-face and telephone MI.
22. Sabar and Tenenboim, “State-Orchestrated Exclusion.”
23. All excerpts from interviews conducted in Hebrew were translated into English by the authors while maintaining the interviewee’s original style and tone.
24. Goffman, Asylums, 230.
25. Interpreters are encouraged to use the first and second person while interpreting—directly transmitting the message and not reporting it in the third person.
26. Gesher (Heb. ‘bridge’) is a mental health clinic for people without legal status, asylum seekers, and victims of human trafficking.
27. Indeed, and in line with the above discussion of secondary adjustments, the literature on medical interpreting recognizes that the ideal of a “transparent tube” is seldom fulfilled, and even makes the case for its undesirability. Goffman, Asylums; Leanza, “Roles of Community Interpreters”; Hseih, “Conflicts in How Interpreters Manage.”
28. In “Female Occupation?” (167–69), Shlesinger, Voinova, and Schuster note how some community interpreting students perceive empathy, as well as other emotions, as “non-professional.”
29. Goffman, Asylums, 320.
30. Inghilleri, “Mediating Zones of Uncertainty,” 74.
31. Bot, “Myth of the Uninvolved Interpreter,” 34.
32. Goffman, Asylums.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yonatan N. Gez
Yonatan N. Gez is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Michal Schuster
Michal Schuster is a research associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She holds a PhD in translation and interpreting from Bar Ilan University, Israel, where she also teaches. Her primary field of research is medical interpreting, which she teaches at academic institutions and at various non-academic organizations.