The influence of healthcare professionals on medical interpreting recognition and development

The linguistic barriers that healthcare professionals encounter when communicating with foreign language-speaking patients diminish the quality of medical care, as has been demonstrated in several studies. Nevertheless, in Spanish health services, these communicative difficulties are frequently underestimated and, in order to overcome them, ad hoc interpreters are used. The main objective of this article consists in showing that the use of untrained interpreters partly derives from healthcare professionals’ unfamiliarity with the complexity of the interpreters’ role and their lack of awareness of the risks involved in communicating through unqualified interpreters. Ultimately we expect to emphasize the influence of healthcare professionals on the development of medical interpreting.