Interpreters as facilitators of emotional expressions in multilingual medical interactions: Observations from Italian healthcare practices

Abstract

This article discusses insights from a research on the management of emotions in medical interactions involving Italian healthcare providers, Arabic speaking interpreters and Arabic speaking patients. The findings suggest that the possibility for patient’s emotions to become relevant in the medical encounter is affected by the activity of interpreters as mediators of the inter-linguistic interaction. While this contribution also considers examples of interpreters’ choices excluding the emotions of the patients from the interaction, the discussion focuses on affective formulations of patient’s expression of emotions, as an interactional resource to make doctors aware of patients’ emotional expressions emerged from dyadic monolingual interactions. This article concludes by suggesting that interpreters as linguistic mediators may effectively promote emotional literacy in healthcare interactions, promoting a patient-centred model of multilingual healthcare.