Interpreters in medical interactions: giving meanings to communicative practices
| Author: | Ticca, Anna Claudia |
| Abstract: | |
| Studies on cross linguistic and cross cultural communication raise the issue of interpreting the meaning of non verbal behavior (gaze, gesture, pause, etc.) and conversational norms which can be culture dependant and difficult to understand when we observe data outside our language and culture. This study of doctor-patient interactions mediated by ad hoc interpreters offers important contributions to the methodology of CA when used to examine cross linguistic encounters. By observing the behavior of the interpreter and more specifically the self selected interventions, that is, spontaneous contributions which have not been invited by any of the primary participants but are prompted by the shape and the content of a particular sequence of talk, we are able to find out the following: first, we clearly see that the conversational activities of the patients who belong to the minority community of speakers differ from the ones usually observed in the literature of doctor- patient interactions, both in endolanguage, and in mediated exolanguage communication. Second, we see that the different practices can cause conflicts and misunderstandings. Third, that the behavior of the interpreter help establish that something has gone awry in the interaction and help give positive clues about the meanings at stake. The corpus consists of 80 videorecordings of medical encounters between Mexican doctors and Yucatec patients mediated by bilingual speakers. The study applies CA and is complemented by an ethnographic research. The data has been transcribed following the orthographic conventions elaborated by Jefferson and later improved in Heritage y Maynard (2006). |
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