Describing the nature of interpreter-mediated doctor-patient communication: A quantitative discourse analysis of community interpreting

This dissertation focuses on community interpreting in the pediatric section of a primary care public health facility and the nature of the interpreter-mediated medical discourse that takes place between English-speaking resident and attending physicians and the Spanish-speaking patients' mothers. This is a quantitative discourse analysis carried out by expanding on categories proposed in previous work by Wadensjö (1992, 1998) and refined herein.; Examining the differences between the primary parties' original utterances and the interpreter's renditions of them, I developed subcategories for future quantitative analyses. These subcategories were described as they occurred in 11 transcribed interviews. The analysis of these subcategories revealed that: (1) The conduit model of interpreting, which is the basis for traditional error analysis, lacks sufficient detail to reflect the complexities of interpreter mediated discourse in community settings; and (2) the interpreter is a full-fledged participant in the discourse whose responsibilities lie in the skopos of the interpreted speech event and in the expectations that the primary parties bring with them to the medical encounter.; With regards to (2), the interpreter's role can be quantitatively analyzed in such a way that reflects the demands being made on the interpreter, the relationships between all parties in the speech event, and the effect that the mode of interpreting can have on the accuracy of interpretation. The fact that an interpreter does not only relay exactly what the primary parties say is not, necessarily, evidence of incompetence or unethical behavior but rather a reflection of the complex reality of the interpreted event and the demands of assuring the success of the medical encounter as a whole. Certain types of utterances like banter, phatic expressions, repetitions and anything unrelated to the goals of the interview can, at times, be omitted without negatively impacting the interpreted speech event. Researchers of interpreting need to reexamine the ways in which face-to-face interpreting is evaluated in order to guarantee that future analyses reflect the true nature of interpreted discourse.