Costs and benefits of bridging the language gap through non-professional interpreters: a Flemish case-study

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at Kind en Gezin (K&G), the organization that monitors childcare for the Flemish authorities in Belgium, we analyzed 74 video recorded conversations between service providers and immigrant mothers (for a general overview of the research project, we refer to the presentation of Van Praet, De Wilde & Rillof). In this paper we discuss a subpart of the total corpus (15 video recorded conversations out of 74), thereby zooming in on the institutional encounters where two service providers – non-Turkish nurses on the one hand and Dutch-Turkish bilingual family support workers on the other – collaborate in order to enhance service quality provided to Turkish-speaking mothers. The first part of the paper addresses the implications of the organization’s multilingual strategies, some of which are no longer suited to face the challenges posed by a growing superdiverse society. Analyzing institutional documents and interview content with key figures, we set out the institutional background of the family support workers and, most importantly, the current challenges they are facing due to changing contextual needs. In the second part of the paper we examine how the presence of a family support worker affects the spoken interaction. More precisely, we compare the intervention of family support workers and professional interpreters, in particular with regard to the five basic principles inscribed in the code of ethics for social interpreters active in Flanders. In order to achieve that, the 15 mediated interactions were analyzed from a micro-analytic perspective, concentrating thereby on the following analytical criteria: turn-taking (self-selection or allocated turns), length of verbal content (shorter or longer formulations), register adjustments, non-verbal interaction (eye-gaze, body position, facial gestures). In the concluding paragraphs, and based on this double inquiry, we draw up a list of possible costs and benefits of working with family support workers in this particular institutional setting