Public service interpreting in social care

In this chapter, we consider social care as the provision of help, care and protection from harm to people who need additional support. This support can take a wide variety of forms and is often carried out informally by relatives, but here we primarily focus on variants of social care that occur within institutional contexts and we zoom in on situations in which the presence of an interpreter is required. These situations have thus far not been studied very extensively and in the literature, attention is mainly drawn to interpreting quality and the need for training of interpreters as well as social care providers. Next to these topics, a number of critical issues emerge, namely (1) the specific complexity and consequences of the choice to use professional interpreters or to draw on alternatives; (2) the implications of the fact that many multilingual professionals engaged in social care assume a double role; (3) the challenge of establishing rapport, which is crucial in social care contexts, but which is described as difficult when a third party is present and (4) the issue of interpreters as potential gatekeepers in social care interactions. A few concluding remarks will close this chapter.