Towards critical intercultural training for public service interpreters

Abstract

This chapter investigates ways towards a tertiary critical intercultural course for public service interpreters. The course will be designed to train public service interpreters to lecture and communicate about real-life situations that they have experienced during interpreted encounters. The main topic in this chapter is to present and discuss a theoretical framework based on significant critical cultural and philosophical perspectives on enlarged thought that can support the interpreters in their lectures. The theoretical framework is tested on empirical material consisting of two situations narrated by public service interpreters in lectures for public service providers and clients, migrants, and refugees, attending Swedish language classes. The main conclusions are that the interpreter’s experiences and narratives of real-life situations allow the participants to visit situations that are often familiar but presented from the interpreter’s perspective. These real-life situations are therefore well situated to enhance enlarged thought, which we have identified as a capacity that may lead to better understanding, moral reciprocity, and responsible judgement, and therefore facilitating the long-term goal of these lectures, which is to improve conditions for legally secure, equal, and fair encounters between public service professionals and non-majority-language-speaking clients. Lecturing about real-life situations entails difficulties, though. One such difficulty is the risk of reproducing essentialist ways of explaining culture, thus confirming prejudice and discriminatory practices. One core issue of this intercultural training would be to move from emic interpretations of culture to etic critical interpretations in line with how the concept of culture is critically defined in theory.