Doctor's acknowledgments of patients' answers: rendition patterns in interpreter-mediated, history-taking sequences

In our increasingly multicultural society, contacts among speakers of different languages and with different cultural backgrounds are increasingly frequent. Institutions need to serve a diverse public who may not speak the same language as the providers or may not be accustomed to the procedures of the service. Many public institutions in Europe are consequently implementing interpreting and translation services, which allow them to communicate with speakers from around the world. In this paper, I take an interactional approach to study sequences of dialogue interpreting in healthcare settings. In particular, the sequences were selected in such a way as to be “highly informative”, that is to say where the actual exchange of “facts” is the main goal. These sequences are those where doctors ask patients about their medical history i.e. symptoms, life habits, relevant diseases in their families and the like. This choice is based on two reasons: a. facts are likely to be rendered accurately and precisely, with little possibility of modification; b. to use the Brown and Yule definition (1983), these sequences are mainly transactional”, with expectedly little involvement of emotion or rapport. Because of these characteristics, these sequences may provide examples where information transfer is quite straightforward and understanding details is the main issue. They are thus likely to show instances where rendition is particularly close (and potentially unproblematic). My data show that while doctor’s history-taking questions are systematically rendered for the patients, unproblematically and immediately after the doctors’ turns, patients’ responses are instead often followed by more elaborate interpreting sequences leading to patients’ answers and doctors’ acknowledgments of such answers. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the recent debate in dialogue interpreting and section 3 illustrates the reaction to the debate from an interactional perspective. Section 4 deals with the function of history-taking sessions in (monolingual) medical interaction. The data used in this study are described in section 5 and the actual analysis of interpreter-mediated interaction in history-taking sequences comes in section 6. Some concluding remarks close the paper