Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Qual Health Res. 2023 Oct;33(12):1037-1048. doi: 10.1177/10497323231191712. Epub 2023 Aug 27.
Telehealth has been widely adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this article examines challenges faced by telephone interpreters in working with healthcare providers in the context of the Australian healthcare system. Based on one-on-one interviews with 67 healthcare interpreters in Australia, it explores various elements which affect communication processes in telephone interpreting and interpreters' views on healthcare providers' abilities to collaborate with interpreters. Data analysis indicates that telephone interpreting is often affected by a lack of briefing, poor acoustics and the absence of visual cues. While these factors pose significant challenges to telephone interpreters, a provider's tendency to see interpreters as 'translation machines' was perceived as a deeper underlying problem by the interpreters. The mechanistic approaches to interpreting among healthcare providers pose barriers to interpreter-provider collaboration and exacerbate communication problems caused by the external elements in telephone-interpreted encounters. The article calls for urgent need to raise awareness of interpreting among healthcare providers as a key to ensuring desirable health outcomes for patients from minority backgrounds.
远程医疗在 COVID-19 大流行期间得到了广泛应用，本文考察了在澳大利亚医疗体系背景下，电话口译员在与医疗服务提供者合作时所面临的挑战。本文通过对澳大利亚的 67 名医疗口译员进行一对一访谈，探讨了影响电话口译中交流过程的各种因素，以及口译员对医疗服务提供者与口译员协作能力的看法。数据分析表明，电话口译通常受到缺乏准备、声学条件差和缺乏视觉提示等因素的影响。尽管这些因素对电话口译员构成了重大挑战，但提供者倾向于将口译员视为“翻译机器”，这被口译员视为更深层次的潜在问题。医疗服务提供者机械地对待口译工作，这为口译员与提供者之间的协作设置了障碍，加剧了电话口译中由于外部因素而导致的沟通问题。本文呼吁迫切需要提高医疗服务提供者对口译工作的认识，这是确保少数族裔背景患者获得理想健康结果的关键。
