Training of public service providers and professionals in the work with translators, interpreters, and languages of lesser diffusion a review of some guides

Abstract

This paper aims at providing an overview of how some guides for public service providers and professionals on the work with translators and interpreters have been structured and, therefore, evaluating their contents to identify their approaches and focuses and to reflect upon their comprehensiveness regarding the elements of interpreting and translation processes and their references to languages of lesser diffusion. To that end, a contrastive analysis of corpus was carried out, considering some of the recommendations for the creation of this type of material provided by Corsellis (2008) and the desired competencies of public professionals and providers on such work (Corsellis, 2003 and 2008). One of the main findings is that most of the analyzed guides focus on interpreting in health contexts and the immediacy of its provision with general references to languages of lesser diffusion. However, several good practices can be found in the material, which could be taken to a greater extent to help fight language prejudices and provide key information to the public service personnel so that they can consciously and sensitively work with translators and interpreters to guarantee equal access to the quality services.