Interpreting in Mental Health Settings

Translation agency Bromberg & Associates continues its Monthly Mentoring Meetings for Southeast Michigan interpreters and translators. The April session was dedicated to language interpretation in mental health settings. Jinny Bromberg, a certified Court Interpreter and Laura Fischer, a mental health clinician with Oakland County Mental Health Authority, led the discussion on the importance of collaboration between mental health and language professionals in order to provide better care to limited English proficiency patients. Healthcare interpreters of the Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin languages joined the dialogue.

Providing efficient health care to patients who don’t speak English as their first language is challenging for everyone involved: medics, patients, and interpreters. Healthcare interpreters strive to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps between patients and providers. Healthcare interpreters must provide accurate and instantaneous relay of information from one language into another, and to do so they need to be fully proficient in their working languages, be able to interpret consecutively and simultaneously, and be well versed in medical terminology and healthcare concepts. In addition, healthcare interpreters also serve as cultural brokers, helping medical professionals provide culturally competent care.

The demanding role of healthcare interpreters is twice as difficult when working with mental health patients. Besides experiencing linguistic and cultural barriers, interpreting in mental health settings frequently presents the unique challenge of working with individuals who have dysfluent or even alinguistic means of expression. Mental health professionals depend heavily on language form and content for diagnosis and treatment. Nuances in communication, for example, including affective tone and subtleties of language structure, may be significant for diagnosis and treatment effectiveness. Beyond these complexities associated with language form, there is a unique vocabulary as well as specialized and deliberate techniques of speaking in therapeutic relationships.

Both linguistic and mental health professionals need additional training and better understanding of each others roles to create a team approach to treating mental health patients with limited English proficiency. An educational session offered by Bromberg & Associates is one of the first steps in this direction.