Global Visions: Interpreting and translating for end-of-life care: On interpersonal, emotional and linguistic challenges

This seminar focuses on community interpreting and translation in oncological and palliative care, addressing the current state and condition of interpreting and translating for extra vulnerable patients (both in Poland and globally). It also delves into the emotional burden faced by interpreters and translators in this field.

Our international speaker, Katarzyna Czarnocka-Gołębiewska (PhD), will also comment on quality and its assurance in community translation for healthcare. She will discuss translator training whilst at the same time pointing out challenges and discussing issues that require further attention.

Background

Community interpreters and translators work in cancer-related healthcare settings to ensure that patients’ have access to information about their health status, prognosis and treatment options, etc., as this affects patient dignity, autonomy and their quality of life and dying. Patients in end-of-life care are particularly vulnerable, as their treatment requires excellent understanding of psychosocial, cultural and emotional needs, which translates into extra challenges and training needed for healthcare interpreters and translators.

Problems in healthcare interpreting include inaccuracy of interpreting that can be life-threatening, lack of understanding about the specificity of a given care pathway as well as the patient’s non-medical needs (e.g. culture-bound, psychosocial) and, in the case of many countries (including Poland), the lack of professionalization of the interpreter profession. For this reason, there is a strong need to investigate and develop good practices and standards for community interpreting and translation.

Refreshments are provided, please register to attend.

Katarzyna Czarnocka-Gołębiewska PhD, (formerly Stachowiak) is a visiting Canterbury Fellow in Translation & Interpreting at the University of Canterbury and a researcher and an academic teacher at the University of Warsaw, Poland, who also teaches at University of Texas at Arlington. She has over 10 years of experience in cognitive studies, including patient-doctor-interpreter interactions. She has written a published PhD thesis on eye movements and gestures language processing and a book in the field of phonology. She has been a head/ co- researcher in projects on phonological development, eye movements and gestures, number processing, multimodal cognitive processing, drug use and drug-drug interactions. She is also involved in projects on language access and literacy in healthcare and patient wellbeing. She published in the field of not only linguistics, but also pharmacology and cancer care. She is a member of the Polish Committee for Standardization, a co-founder of the Polish Association of Conference Interpreters and a member of national and international scientific teams and associations.