Page 248 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

226 Helen Spencer-Oatey and Jianyu Xing

that it was his responsibility to protect his father “from the ‘bad news’ of his
cancer and his impending mortality” and insisted that he should act as inter-
preter.
In other circumstances, however, the use of a relative as an interpreter is
highly problematic for cultural reasons, as Linda Haffner’s (1992) personal ex-
perience as an interpreter illustrates:

My next summons is from the Internal Medicine Clinic. The patient, a 50-year-old
female peasant from Mexico, is accompanied by her 35-year-old son. Although the
patient has been coming to the clinic for some time, she is new to me. Her son usually
interprets, as he is reasonably fluent in both languages. This time I am called because
the son has to leave to go to work.
Before going into the room, the physician expresses to me his concern about whether
the health problems claimed by this woman are real or imagined. She has been in the
clinic three times before, each time with different vague and diffuse complaints, none
of which make medical sense. As we learn, the poor woman has a fistula in her rec-
tum. In her previous visits, she could not bring herself to reveal her symptoms in the
presence of, and therefore to, her son as he interprets for her. She tells me that she has
been so embarrassed about her condition that she has invented other symptoms to jus-
tify her visits to the physician. She confesses that she has been eager to have a hospital
staff interpreter from the first visit, but her hope had not materialized until now.
Haffner (1992: 256)
The problems of using relatives as interpreters are even more acute in the case of
children. Haffner (1992) reports one situation where a pregnant woman was
found to be having a stillbirth, and her 7-year-old daughter was used to tell her
mother that the baby was dead. She then recounts the following incident, and re-
flects on culturally-related factors:

I am reminded of the time when I was required for a family conference for a patient
about to be discharged. When I arrive at the conference, present are a physician, a
nurse, a physical therapist, a social worker, and several family members. The patient,
the father, is absent. Everyone is sitting around a table except one. Standing by the
physician is the patient’s 9-year-old son, who is acting as the interpreter. The child
looks frightened. The physician rather abruptly says to me, “We don’t need you, the
boy is doing fine”. The boy, however, pleads with me to stay and take over, saying,
“Please, Señora, can you help me? I don’t know if I am doing it right”. … Being an
interpreter is a heavy burden for a child, whose English is frequently marginal and
certainly is not sophisticated. Disregard for these factors is hurtful to both the child
and the family and threatens the effectiveness of the communication. The trauma to
the unfortunate little girl (whose mother has a stillborn) is easily seen. I doubt any-
one would consider using a child in this way if there were no language barrier. The
situation in which the boy was used as an interpreter is similarly difficult, but the dif-
ficulty is perhaps a little more subtle.
In rural Hispanic culture, the hierarchy is strict, with authority running from older to
younger and from male to female. These relationships are for life, with parents in