Interpretation as a form of mediation for the bilingual dialogue between foreign citizens and institutions. A qualitative study of interpreted-mediated doctor-patient communication in Italian hospitals

Objectives:
Sociolinguistic studies on dialogue interpretation suggest that the interpreters in healthcare settings play a double role: they interpret and coordinate communication. Starting from the observation of actual and naturally-occurring interactions in intercultural healthcare services, the article suggests how an analysis of intercultural mediation may provide an empirical-based route to create guidelines for effective mediation practices.
Methods:
Our data is based on a corpus of 55 multilingual medical interaction in Arabic and Italian in public healthcare services in Italy. The corpus is analyzed drawing upon Conversation Analysis, studies on Dialogue Interpreting and studies on intercultural communication.
Results:
This article connects the forms of intercultural communication promoted by the mediators and the linguistic aspects of mediation, discussing how the relevance of the migrant patients' voices in medical encounters is connected with the use of specific conversational resources by the mediators.
Conclusions:
It will be shown: 1) how interpreters cut out migrant patients' voices of the interaction with the doctor by producing partial translations which focus on problems and treatments in medical terms; 2) how interpreters make migrant patients' voices relevant in the interaction.
Practice implications:
A conversational resource, affective formulations, is effective in capitalizing potential emphatic opportunities offered by the patient.

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