The interpreter’s activity between complexity and simplification in psychotherapy sessions

International audienceThis article deals with the use of video-recordings of spontaneous interactions in workplaces as resources fortraining courses. It focuses on a multilingual psychotherapy consultation with a refugee in France, in which aninterpreter was present. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis, this contribution shows the coordinated andcollaborative dimension of meaning construction in a therapist-initiated question-answer sequence and the way itis dealt with by her co-participants. The detailed analysis of the interaction highlights the challenges oftranslating the therapist's talk when it embeds medical as well as cultural assumptions regarding the patient. Adiscussion of the implications of this type of analysis for interpreter-mediated consultations and of the interestof an interdisciplinary approach to data analysis concludes the article