Professionalization of interpreters and interpreter users in Belgium through inter-professional joint training

Already during the 2010 Trieste conference on PSI interpreting, we made a plea for the “next step in the CBI (Community Based Interpreting) professionalisation process” through training the public service providers (Salaets, 2012). Terminology was not clear at that time and still isn’t: PSI and Community Interpreting are both still used but are always not interchangeable. However, this contribution is not about terminology but about the training of public service providers meaning doctors, nurses, therapists etc. and also legal actors like police officers, judges, lawyers etc. We were not the first, nor will we be the last to detect the need for this type of training and the call for shared responsibility (see Corsellis 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008, Garret 2009, Perez and Wilson (2007, 2011), Tebble (2003) and more recently Krystallidou and Krystallidou et al.). We would like to share our experiences regarding inter-professional training with legal actors, which could be used as an example for other domains (health care, social services etc.)*. Two examples will be presented: a first example is a mock trial in court where three cases are presented in a fairly realistic way in an Antwerp court room, with “real” judges, prosecutors, police officers, lawyers, clerks and an interpreter at work, as in real life. Only the suspect and victim role players had been briefed beforehand. We will explain how this event was prepared, organized and afterwards analyzed, and how the recordings are currently used as pedagogical material. In a second example we will illustrate the joint training with the Federal Police, more specifically the T.A.M.**- police officers who are specially trained in questioning minors. This is a first result of the joint training model proposed after the Co-Minor-IN/QUEST project. According to this model, police officers and interpreters/interpreter trainers participate together in a training session on child interviewing. Finally, we will explain how we will continue to build further on the experience gained in the Co-Minor-IN/QUEST II project where we will involve all stakeholders in the training, i.e. all legal actors (not only police officers) but also psychiatrists, (forensic) psychologists, child support workers and the minors themselves (through experiments). The ultimate goal is to organize joint training not only for professionals but also (and mostly) for would-be professionals of all domains in society , in other words for the students who will become interpreters, lawyers, judges, police officers … but also for future nurses, doctors, social workers and so on. * In Belgium/Flanders already two examples of this joint awareness raising can be found: information leaflets for interpreter users, as well as an interdisciplinary way of working (COC, Brussels) during the second module of the training course where service providers come and explain their work and eventually role plays are done. ** Dutch and French acronym for Technique for Audio-visual interviewing of Minorsstatus: publishe