Interpreters

I've been working with interpreters on and off for six years now. These days what particularly interests me is the links between interpreting and advocacy - particularly as I try to support RASA Advocacy Project in its work with refugees. After all if advocacy is about getting your voice heard, then if English isn't your first language and you don't know the culture or systems you're working with, making your voice heard is an even more challenging task, and more needful and demanding of advocacy support.

There are lots of things to say about interpreting which I can't cover now, but my conclusion has been to use interpreters directly in my work as little as possible. I remember going to meet someone who was about to be evicted on the request of their Social Worker, because he ‘couldn't speak any English at all, and there was something else wrong with him - maybe learning difficulties’ (to paraphrase). I went without an interpreter, and even on that occasion I was able to communicate quite effectively with him. Less than a week later I was having conversations about world politics, migration, economics and art with him. A few weeks later, over a 4 hour conversation (admittedly a long time, but advocates need a long time), I got down the details of his asylum application more thoroughly than any of his previous Home Office interviewers or legal representatives.

This was a particularly vivid example, but it has often been replicated on a smaller scale. I think the key is trust, along with really listening - which requires engaging with the person I'm talking to. The trouble with using an interpreter is that many of the signals each of you is trying to send out can be lost in the translation. All the nuances of language which caring professionals learn to use to put people at ease are reduced to the simple mechanics of interpetation.

If we could train the people we need to communicate with to use interpreters effectively we could manage with this process: they would be interested enough, determined enough, and have the skills to ask all the questions they need to properly understand what we're saying. Unfortunately that isn't the case, and often this is compounded by various issues of the interpreter themselves (e.g. been in England for 20 years and can't actually remember their own language all that well, or from an antagonistic political group, or still bound up with the homophobia prevalent in their native culture, etc.).

Sometimes of course we need to tackle these issues and just make the interpreting process work, and in many jobs it's impractical to use any other method. I recently met a detained asylum seeker, but despite knowing his official broad ethnic origin I found it difficult to determine his actual language, and I was worried that his interpretation and other support needs weren't being met. He did have a 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreter working with him, an interpreter I know already from previous work, and I could have used him. Instead I found a volunteer from RASA.

The gamble paid off very nicely, as it turned out that the two men were almost neighbours in their home country and could communicate very well (unlike the interpreter it turns out, who is from another region and speaks a different dialect). My criteria for choosing this volunteer were quite different though. I wanted an 'ordinary' person with a modest, kind, open, quiet, relaxed and friendly manner; someone who knew the difficulties of the English welfare state, but didn't assume knowledge; someone who spoke enough English to communicate with me, not necessarily to pass exams; someone with experience of advocacy. My volunteer has never acted as an advocate, but I have been his advocate in the past so he knows what he needed to. I've also known him for two years now and he has kindly done other things for me in the past.

The meeting went well. Apparently this was the first time the asylum seeker had spent such a long time engaging with anyone. I got a good picture of his character. He did these little theatrical answers occasionally if I asked a question he didn't like. Much of the meeting went by without being interpreted for me, which was fine for the first session. I didn't get any advocacy goals, and I don't know whether the two will meet again, but I hope after a little reflection I will be asked to arrange another meeting, and anyway I know I can communicate more now that there is some trust and understanding developed.

I had an interesting conversation with the staff afterwards too. They said they could only use properly 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreters, and they couldn't involve my volunteer.

An interesting analogy came to me in that conversation, to do with research methodology. I've recently seen some very badly designed questionnaires going around, in fact questionnaires that seem primarily designed to be able to be analysed (you know the kind - each question has four alternative answers, or you give a number from 1 to 5, bad to good). It seemed to me that the sort of conversations interpreters get involved in are quite similar to these questionnaires: you get an answer, but it's just a summary, the best answer of an unsatisfactory selection.

There is another approach to doing research though, based on interviewing. This approach is much more broad, and the interviews can go in many different directions. It's useful of course to start with an idea of the information you want to get, but at the same time much more relevant learning can be gained in the spaces that are developed between the questions you plan to ask. Of course properly interpreting and evaluating the value of information you get from this process requires even more time and effort, but it seems to me this effort is worth it. My interpreter/volunteer was helping me to go through this process - and it seems completely possible to me for the police or psychiatrists or prison staff to take a similar approach, rather than persevere with registered but sometimes inappropriate professional interpreters.

And that goes for all the rest of us too.