| Resumen: |
Non-professional interpreting is the norm in the healthcare centres of the northeastern Spanish province of Lleida, wherein over 20% of the resident population (~375,000 inhabitants) is of migrant background. Additionally, 20,000-30,000 temporary workers come to the region yearly to work during harvest season under poor conditions that impact their health negatively (González et al. , 2024). Therefore, different multilingual agents and resources —machine translation, relatives, children, multilingual staff, etc. — come into play when a linguistic barrier arises between healthcare practitioners and migrant patients with limited proficiency in Catalan or Spanish, the region’s official languages. While the role of some of those agents has been researched in other geographical contexts, there still seems to be little research regarding community leaders, a figure relied upon by local healthcare practitioners and stakeholders for non-professional interpreting. The aim of this presentation is twofold. First, it aims at identifying all the multilingual agents acknowledged by healthcare practitioners and stakeholders, as well as their perceptions and preferences. The second objective focuses on practitioners’ perceptions of community leaders and on the ways in which they interact with them when confronted with linguistic barriers. In order to achieve this, twenty semi-structured in-depth interviews with healthcare practitioners and stakeholders will be analysed and data from a questionnaire addressed to 40 health professionals will be extracted. The preliminary results show that practitioners use machine translation often but complain about quality issues which hinder effective communication. In its turn, in terms of human non-professional interpreters, practitioners seem to be warier of acquaintances and relatives than community leaders. The presentation will end by addressing how this might be biased, as practitioners do not question how leaders assert their role within the community, and they do not seem to apply the same standards to both. |
visitante ::
identificación
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
