Bilingual and Trilingual Clinical Consultation

This book, which is mostly a collection of the author’s research, deals with clinical encounters through an interpreter. The book analyses the clinical communication and interpretation process from a new point of view. Clinical consultation through an interpreter can be divided into bilingual and trilingual communication. Bilingual communication means that the interpreter and the patient have the same mother tongue; thus, two languages are involved in communication: the patient’s and the health provider’s languages. In trilingual clinical encounters, the patient and interpreter have different mother tongues but both know a common language. In that case, three languages will be involved in the communication: patient’s, interpreter’s, and caregivers’ languages. The interpretation process is doubled; first the patient must encode her/his language inside the brain (internal encoding), then the interpreter must interpret the message into the caregiver’s language (external encoding). The risk of misunderstandings in trilingual communication is significantly higher than in bilingual communication. The book explores the difficulties involved in multilingual communication in a medical context, and will be of use to medical professionals and those in the field of language studies.