The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 20 - 2015

This paper studies the activity of lay interpreters (LI) in bilingual (Yucatec Maya and Spanish) medical consultations. It focuses in particular on the interpreter’s correction of responses that patients give to doctors. The occurrence of such correcting sequences reveals some trouble in the patient’s response to questions in Spanish, or in understanding the LI’s translation of the prior question. It also reveals the LI’s understanding of the doctor’s questions, as well as her/his orientation towards the production of the appropriate information needed to match such questions. Central in this study are cases in which the doctor seeks to quantify an undetermined value (related to time, intensity, frequency of a symptom or trouble). The analysis shows that the LIs intervene recurrently to specify the patients’ response to this type of question, pursuing a definite and translatable quantitative figure that could be delivered to the physician. Such practice also allows us to have access to the Lis’ local understanding of their specific role in the current activity. As such, this study contributes to shade light on this common yet controversial and still under-investigated type of community interpreting in healthcare. The data, which consist of a large corpus of video-recorded consultations, have been analysed with the methodological tools of conversation analysis.