Good health across languages: how access to healthcare by non-Italian speaking patients is ensured in Italy. A case study.

Abstract

This study aims at investigating healthcare interaction first and foremost as a form of institutional talk-in-interaction (Schegloff 1990), which, when interpretermediated, requires an adjustment of discourse practices and configuration (Pochhacker and Shlesinger 2007), with a shift in the distribution of powers in terms of turn allocation and interaction coordination (Baraldi and Gavioli 2012). Real-life data are collected in the “Healthcare Interpreting Quality 2014-2015 Corpus” (HCIQ.1415) compiled by Dal Fovo (forthcoming). By necessarily drawing on analytical frameworks such as Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) and interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982), recurring phenomena in the examined interactions will be identified and studied from a functional point of view (Levinson 1983). In particular, the analysis focuses on episodes that highlight interpreters’ choices promoting or excluding emotions (cf. Farini 2015), by tentatively applying Merlini and Gatti’s (2015) theoretical framework to the data. Results shall ideally serve as orientation for professionals to deal with ELFrelated issues that usually emerge in interpreter-mediated doctor-patient interactions, by considering such communication instances as a specific kind of discourse, rather than a mere deviation from the norm – i.e. monolingual doctor-patient interactions.