Interprofessional education in interpreter training

Abstract

Abstract Interpreters work with clients from many professions and in different contexts and settings. A facilitator of interpreters’ ability to provide an optimal interlingual transfer of another’s speech or signing is possessing knowledge of other professionals’ perspectives and goals. Interprofessional education is a teaching or learning method that includes learning activities in which trainees from two or more disciplines interact with each other in real or simulated settings. This article reports on the participation of interpreting students in interprofessional education with medical and social work students over a three-year period. Responses were obtained from 109 interpreting students across four medicine–interpreting and three social work–interpreting sessions relating to their perception of the roles of the other student groups pre- and post-intervention and how best to work with each group. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that pre-intervention knowledge of the doctors’ work was significant while knowledge about social work was varied; there were high levels of agreement that knowledge of the other group had increased post-intervention; future intentions were related to greater awareness of a briefing, applying knowledge of the relevant genre of spoken interaction, the need for the allophone interlocutors to establish rapport with each other, and awareness of source speakers’ tone and intent in addition to form and content.