| This dissertation focuses on medical interpretation, and the role of hospital based professional interpreters within outpatient medical interviews. Interpreters represent the point of contact between the agents and agencies of the First World hospital clinic and the post-colonial immigrants of the Third World; hence the study of hospital interpreters was conducted as a combined political, social, and linguistic enterprise.; Examining the construction of reciprocity and meaning in interpreted conversations, a model of turn-taking was developed and applied to ten interpreted and ten same-language medical interviews. The analysis of these excerpts revealed that: (1) for all forms of interpreted dialogue, the difficulty lies, not only in the accurate transformation of semantic and pragmatic content (the latter a far more complicated task than the former), but also in the construction of reciprocal understanding between the two primary speakers; and that (2) in interpreted medical interviews, the interpreter carries out her duties as linguistic facilitator in variable fashion. For physicians, the interpreter maintains a role of "instrument", in that she interprets immediately (and to the best of her ability), what the physician has said; for patients, however, the interpreter frequently engages in side conversations concerning the patient's contributions, and acts as a co-conversationalist.; With regards to point (2), the interpreter's role can be analyzed, given her actions and her position within the hospital clinic, as one of pre-diagnostician; that is, interpreters frequently edit patients' contributions, or in the case of questions either ignore them or answer them without conveying them to the physician first, thus short-circuiting the co-construction of meaning between the physician and the patient and reducing the patient's ability to contribute effectively toward the goals of the speech event. The explicit mandate provided to interpreters, "interpret all and only what is being said", is subverted by the competing mandate, "keep the patient 'on track', and keep the interview moving quickly". As a result of time pressures and the physician's willingness to remove herself from the discourse, the interpreter acts on the behalf of the clinic, to evaluate the patient's contributions for relevance and for timeliness. |
