Dialogue Interpreting in Mental Health

Book excerpt: In this era of globalisation, the use of interpreters is becoming increasingly important in business meetings and negotiations, government and non-government organisations, health care and public service in general. This book focuses specifically on the involvement of interpreters in mental health sessions. It offers a theoretical foundation to aid the understanding of the role-issues at stake for both interpreters and therapists in this kind of dialogue. In addition to this, the study relies on the detailed analysis of a corpus of videotaped therapy sessions. The theoretical foundation is thus linked to what actually takes place in this type of talk. Conclusions are then drawn about the feasibility and desirability of certain discussion techniques. Dialogue Interpreting in Mental Health offers insight into the processes at work when two people talk with the help of an interpreter and will be of value to linguists specialising in intercultural communication, health care professionals, interpreters and anyone working in multilingual situations who already uses or is planning to use an interpreter.