Uh I Am Not Understanding You at All: Constructing (Mis)Understanding in Provider/Patient-Interpreted Medical Encounters

In multilingual societies, patients seeking health care and the healthcare professionals who serve them oftendo not speak the same language. In a healthcare encounter, in both urban and rural areas, effective communication between these providers and patients is enabled by interpreters. Interpreters vary in their abilities and qualifi cations;moreover, for some language combinations there simply are as yet no professional interpreters. In this chapter I present a transcript of a typical healthcare provider—patient conversation about the patient's current health concern contextualized in her medical history and medicine intake. I examine the co-construction of understanding among the interlocutors and the way in which they work together in an attempt to communicate. The data are part of a larger ethnographic study (Angelelli, 2001 & 2004a) conducted in a public hospital in California, where interpreters work for Spanishspeaking patients and English-speaking healthcare providers in both face-to-face and over-the-speakerphone interpreted communicative events (ICEs). This study has practical and theoretical implications for interpreting studies in general and for the education of healthcare interpreters and healthcare providers in particular.