Gaining and retaining the trust of the public and those working in institutional settings - lens.monash.edu
Have you ever used interpreters, witnessed them working, or even thought about the interpreting profession? If your answer is no, you’re not alone.
Although interpreters are a lifeline for many speakers of minority languages, the ins and outs of interpreting remain largely unknown to the public. Interpreters are often expected to be “invisible” at work, their role limited to transferring messages from one language to another without actively participating in conversations.
Such invisibility means that, unfortunately, many of the challenges faced by interpreters aren’t widely acknowledged. In this piece, we address one particular challenge – gaining and retaining the trust of the public and those working in institutional settings. We came to this as community-based researchers in vastly different speech communities – the Korean-speaking diaspora in Australia, and speakers of Australian Indigenous languages.
Our research projects centred on the experiences of Korean survivors of domestic violence, and Indigenous language interpreting in legal settings, respectively. And, although our research focused on different languages and areas of research where issues of interpreting were frequently at the forefront, we identified remarkably similar problems.
In particular, we observed substantial trust issues among people working in institutional settings and the general public regarding the guidelines that govern the interpreting profession.