Dialogue interpreting and person-centred care in a clinical mental healthcare setting

Abstract

This chapter examines the intersection between dialogue interpreting and the person-centred care approach to healthcare delivery and communication. Among the different values of person-centred care, this chapter focuses on the enactment of the following principles in interpreter-mediated talk: respecting the patient’s autonomy, consideration of the patient’s spirituality, and relational continuity. The excerpts discussed in this chapter were extracted from audio-recordings of authentic consultations that took place in an outpatient mental healthcare clinic in Scotland. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the data, this chapter posits that interpreters may consciously or non-consciously enable or hamper person-centred communication through their performance. This chapter also illustrates how the way in which interpreters influence person-centred communication largely depends on the alignment, or lack thereof, that exists between the interactional goals of the primary speakers’ utterances and the interpreters’ renditions. Finally, because interpreters make interpreting decisions based on their understanding of the clinical, linguistic and interpersonal goals at play in the encounter, this chapter suggests that interpreters’ awareness of the guiding values of person-centred care is crucial to ensure that linguistically diverse patients fully benefit from such values.