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Article published In: Ethics of Non-Professional Translation and Interpreting
Edited by Esther Monzó-Nebot and Melissa Wallace
[Translation and Interpreting Studies 15:1] 2020
► pp. 80–107

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Community interpreters versus intercultural mediators

Is it really all about ethics?

ORCiD logo with link | University of Ljubljana
ORCiD logo with link | University of Ljubljana
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 11 May 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20027.koc
Abstract
This article compares the professional profile of community interpreters to that of a particular group of intercultural mediators who work as non-professional, untrained interpreters, mainly in healthcare settings. Through a textual comparison of 13 deontological documents for community interpreters and intercultural mediators, this article investigates differences in the ethical positioning of these two profiles. The results show that while the codes of ethics of community interpreters tend to emphasize impartiality, the documents defining the emerging profile of intercultural mediators position advocacy more prominently. Beyond the differences in ethical positioning, the article also considers other reasons for the formation of this new profile and outlines several challenges related to the partial overlap between the two profiles, which include distorted definitions of the interpreter’s competences and performance, conceptual confusion in the research literature, and mismatched expectations of language services consumers.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Overlapping definitions and competing profiles
  • Intercultural mediators
  • Differentiating community interpreters and intercultural mediators
  • Methodology
    • Corpus composition
    • Analysis
  • Results
    • Expected competences
    • The definition of ethical principles listed in the deontological document
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (69)
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