Dialogue Interpreting and Person-Centred Care in a Clinical Mental Healthcare Setting

This chapter examines the intersection between dialogue interpreting and the person-centred care approach to healthcare delivery and communication. It focuses on the enactment of the following principles in interpreter-mediated talk: respecting the patient’s autonomy, consideration of the patient’s spirituality, and relational continuity. The excerpts discussed were extracted from audio-recordings of authentic consultations that took place in an outpatient mental healthcare clinic in Scotland. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the data, the study posits that interpreters may consciously or non-consciously enable or hamper person-centred communication through their performance, and illustrates how the way in which interpreters influence person-centred communication largely depends on the alignment, or lack thereof, that exists between the interactional goals of the primary speakers’ utterances and the interpreters’ renditions. Finally, this study suggests that interpreters’ awareness of the guiding values of person-centred care is crucial to ensure that linguistically diverse patients fully benefit from such values because interpreters make interpreting decisions based on their understanding of the clinical, linguistic, and interpersonal goals at play in the encounter.