Exploring the Boundaries: Attitudinal autonomy in healthcare interpreting

Patients who visit hospitals on the southern coast of Spain range from social immigrants such as tourists and EU expatriate residents to economic immigrants from less developed countries. Both groups have in common their lack of ability to communicate in Spanish. However, while for the first group qualified interpreters are easily accessed, for the second there is a lack of them. As a result, healthcare interpreters must deal with many different agents and an ever-changing social context as regards the power relations that are constantly emerging between doctors and patients. This divergence affects the way interpreters are perceived by healthcare staff on each communicative encounter. In this context, it is necessary to ascertain the effects of the involvement of other patients in the development of an interpreting habitus and to establish a correlation between interpreters’ symbolic capital (as defined in terms of prestige and status) and patients’ social and linguistic background. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a theoretical framework for the analysis of this interpreter-mediated social context, this paper, which is part of an ongoing PhD thesis, concentrates on the concept of ‘boundaries’ as described by Bourdieu (1993/2009) and introduces the concept of ‘attitudinal autonomy’ (Forsyth & Danisiewicz 1985). Investigating the ‘boundaries’ is essential in order to understand the functioning of the field of healthcare interpreting and the power relations between agents and their effect on interpreters’ habitus. However, Bourdieu (1993/2009) does not provide an effective method to explore the boundaries and leaves researchers with a concept that is too abstract to be used as a research tool. In this regard, ‘attitudinal autonomy’, as defined by Forsyth and Danisiewicz (1985) in their “Theory of Professionalization”, contributes significantly to the study of boundaries, since autonomy and boundaries are directly linked in the sense that a high level of autonomy translates as sharp boundaries (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2005)