The corpus “Interpreting in Hospitals”

This paper explores the question how language corpora can enhance discourse analytic research as well as communication trainings. To do this, we refer to the language corpus “Interpreting in hospitals”, and begin by describing it in detail. Subsequently, the paper exemplifies how the corpus was used to analyse ad-hoc-interpreting in medical settings, focusing on the function of specific linguistic elements and speech actions (Bührig & Meyer 2004). Finally, the paper shows how research findings based on the corpus and data from the corpus can be used in communication trainings, describing a training for bilingual hospital employees. The corpus allows trainers to identify relevant training contents, and it offers the possibility to integrate sections of authentic discourse in the training. The paper illustrates how the training participants accepted and worked with the discourse data, and draws conclusions concerning the use of corpus based analyses in trainings on workplace communication.