Pochhacker - Getting Organized in Community Interpreting

Interpreting Vol. 4(1), 1999. 125–140© John Benjamins Publishing Co.

‘Getting Organized’:The Evolution of Community Interpreting

FRANZ PÖCHHACKER

Based on a broad definition of the concept of community interpreting, the papergives an overview of the development of community-based interpreting as aprofession since the 1960s. Reviewing both the field of sign language interpret-ing and spoken-language community interpreting in the context of migration,major elements in the process of professionalization are described withreference to selected examples. The overall picture is one of great diversity ofapproaches, constraints and responses to the challenge of intra-social interpret-ing needs throughout the world, shaped by the variable interplay of factors likethe existence of legal provisions, institutional arrangements for interpreterservice delivery, an authority-driven or profession-based system of accredita-tion or certification more or less specifying standards of practice and profes-sional ethics, training programs within (or outside) the established publicsystem of higher education, and a professional organization more or lessinclusive of various types of interpreting activity. Typically, interpretingservices ‘get organized’ (by institutions or community agencies) before prac-titioners get organized to shape their professional terms of reference, and muchprogress in the evolution of community interpreting is still to be made.

Introduction

Community interpreting only became established as a topic in InterpretingStudies in the early 1990s. The first international conference on “Interpretersin the Community” held at Geneva Park near Toronto, Canada, in 1995,represents the most important landmark in this respect, and it is also signifi-cant that Interpreting, the international journal of the discipline, mentions‘community interpreting’ in the description of its scope and published a paper

126 FRANZ PÖCHHACKER

on community interpreting as an emerging profession (Mikkelson 1996) in itsfirst issue. In earlier years, community interpreting had been dealt with, if atall, only in the context of some professional organizations.

The actual practice of ‘interpreting in the community’ is of course mucholder than its recognition among professional bodies or even scholars ofinterpreting. However, any indication of when the history of communityinterpreting began, is essentially a matter of definition. The present contribu-tion therefore begins with a discussion of conceptual issues surrounding theactivity of community interpreting and its professionalization. Based on myattempt at terminological clarification, I will give a historical overview of thedevelopment of community interpreting as a profession with reference toselected examples. The picture of professionalization that emerges will serveas a basis for a concluding discussion of problems and prospects for theevolution of professional interpreting in the community.

A Matter of Definition

According to Chesher (1997: 278), the term ‘community interpreting’ cameinto use in Australia around 1970 alongside expressions like ‘ethnic commu-nities’ or ‘community health’. In Europe, the term gained currency in the early1980s in Great Britain (cf. Longley 1984; Shackman 1984), where it has sincebeen replaced by ‘public service interpreting’. Elsewhere in the English-speaking world as well as in the predominantly English literature on interpret-ing, ‘community interpreting’ — rather than ‘ad-hoc interpreting’ or ‘culturalinterpreting’ (cf. Roberts 1997: 8) — has become the most widely acceptedlabel.

In the most general sense, community interpreting refers to interpreting ininstitutional settings of a given society in which public service providers andindividual clients do not speak the same language. The fact that “one of theparties involved is an individual acting on his or her own behalf” (Fletcher1989: 129) vis-à-vis the representative of an institution is an essential featureof the concept and implies that the community interpreter “is responsible forenabling professional and client, with very different backgrounds and percep-tions and in an unequal relationship of power and knowledge, to communicateto their mutual satisfaction.” (Shackman 1984: 18)

In contrast to interpreting for international contacts in conference-like

127THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY INTERPRETING

situations or negotiations between interacting parties of (more or less) equalstanding, community interpreting facilitates communication within a socialentity (society) that includes culturally different sub-groups. Hence, the quali-fier ‘community’ refers to both the (mainstream) society as such and itsconstituent sub-community (ethnic or indigenous community, linguistic mi-nority, etc.), which may be one reason why the expression is difficult to renderinto other languages.

In this broad sense, interpreting in intra-social language contact settingsis limited neither to particular institutions nor to particular language or culturalgroups. The representatives of a society’s legal, healthcare, social service,educational or religious institutions, to name the most common generic fields,may need to interact with deaf persons, with members of indigenous commu-nities or with various kinds of migrants, and vice versa. It is this great diversityof institutional settings and cultural backgrounds which makes for the tremen-dous complexity of community interpreting as a concept and renders it verydifficult to describe. Attempts at accounting for the actual practice of commu-nity interpreting therefore tend to be specified for particular settings and theirspecific institutional (e.g. legal) constraints. More often than not, interpretingin legal settings (‘court interpreting’) is viewed as a separate specialty, distinctfrom ‘community interpreting’, which, in this narrower sense, is then linkedprototypically with healthcare and social service settings. With healthcare ormedical interpreting rapidly establishing itself as a professional specializationin its own right (cf. Roberts 1997: 10), it is becoming even more difficult tomaintain ‘unity in diversity’ for the field as a whole.

Professional or Not?

A major issue underlying the ‘balkanization’ of the conceptual and profes-sional terrain of community interpreting is professional status. Thus,González, Vásquez, and Mikkelson (1991), in their Fundamentals of CourtInterpretation, state that “Community interpreting refers to any interpretationprovided by non-professional interpreters.” (1991: 29) This clear-cut distinc-tion between professional (conference, court, escort, business and medical)interpreters on the one hand and amateur (community) interpreters on theother may be inspired by the semantic analogy with (volunteer) ‘communityservice’ or (unpaid) ‘community work’ (cf. Bowen 1998: 319). Apart from


that connotation, however, there is little, if any, factual basis for the claim thatcertain forms of interpreting in the community are inherently more (or less)professional than others. Like the notion of community interpreting itself, theprofessional status of the activity is a matter of definition — and of degree.

Among the various criteria that can be used to define a professionalactivity, the principle of fee for service and the existence of certain standardsof practice stand out as the most important. Judging by the former, therecertainly is — and always will be — interpreting activity in the communitysector which is performed on a non-professional basis, i.e. without remunera-tion, by relatives, friends or other volunteers. By the same token, it is notinconceivable to have bilinguals trained to certain standards who still rendertheir services for free (cf. Gehrke 1989; Greaves 1988). Thus, there may beunpaid interpreting performed by people with training just as there may becommunity interpreting on a fee-for-service basis by untrained practitioners.What standards, then, how much training, and what level of pay will makecommunity interpreters professional?

These questions are subject to the complex interdependence of numerousvariables, including user expectations and service quality, variously defined,if defined at all. In a professional field, of course, the answers would not beimposed ‘from above’ but determined by the collective efforts of like-mindedpractitioners, provided that they manage to ‘get organized’. As we shall see,however, progress on the road to professionalization has not been uniform forthe field as a whole, hence the need to look in more detail at a number of theroads taken and some of the milestones along the way.

Pioneer and Paragon: Interpreting for the Deaf

Interpreting in the community could be traced back to Antiquity (e.g. the useof interpreters for Aramaic-speaking Jews after the Babylonian exile or therole of interpreters in the provinces of the far-flung Roman Empire), andcommunity interpreters would have been found at work in systems of colonialdomination over the centuries (e.g. court interpreters in 16th century NewSpain). Nevertheless, community interpreting is most closely associated withthe provision of and access to public services in the welfare state of the late20th century.

One of the social groups for which the issue of ‘access’ received increas-


ing attention in the 1960s was the deaf community. In line with a growingawareness of the need to support the full participation of disabled (‘handi-capped’) persons in society, U.S. government authorities promoted the reha-bilitation of hearing-impaired and deaf individuals for (re)integration into theworkforce on the basis of legal provisions such as the Vocational Rehabilita-tion Act Amendments of 1965 (which authorized the use and remuneration ofinterpreters for the vocational rehabilitation of hearing-impaired clients) andthe Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. Within this favor-able regulatory environment, a historic workshop held in 1964 for serviceproviders (rehabilitation personnel and educators) and interpreters stressed theneed for professional interpreting and laid the foundations for the creation of anational organization of interpreters. A follow-up meeting in early 1965adopted the constitution of that organization, called the Registry of Interpret-ers for the Deaf (RID), and a third workshop held the same year resulted in amanual compiled by Quigley and Youngs (1965), the first normative andtraining-oriented publication on sign language interpreting (cf. Frishberg1990: 11ff).

Thanks to consistent U.S. government support, the RID, incorporated in1972, became a success story which very well stands comparison with theachievements of AIIC in the international interpreting arena. With a view to itsmission of maintaining a registry of qualified interpreters, the RID developedan evaluation and certification system in the early 1970s and has sincecertified about half of its more than 5,000 members as interpreters and/ortransliterators. In its efforts to establish and enforce professional standards forsign language interpreters, the RID also issued a code of ethics, including suchprinciples as confidentiality and fidelity, which was to prove highly influentialfor the drafting of similar documents on community interpreting in spokenlanguages. Significantly, the RID Code of Ethics includes a provision forfurther training, which is enforced by a Certificate Maintenance Program, i.e.certified members are required to engage in further training on a regular basisin order to keep their certificate valid (cf. Isham 1998: 234).

Concerted efforts to meet the need for interpreter education were madeearly on by the National Interpreter Training Consortium, originally consist-ing of six institutions of higher education throughout the country (cf.Frishberg 1990: 13f). The number of training programs for sign languageinterpreting has since increased significantly, although there are still fewcourses which lead to higher-level degrees (cf. Isham 1998: 234). In 1979, the


Conference of Interpreter Trainers was founded as an association of educatorsin the field of interpreter training and has been actively promoting the profes-sional development of interpreter trainers through conferences and publica-tions (cf. Frishberg 1990: 13f, 88, 93).

Speaking of conferences, it needs to be stressed that the practice of signlanguage interpreting is not limited to community settings. Where deaf chil-dren have the right — and the necessary interpreting services — to receive afull education, a rising number of deaf individuals will make professionalcareers requiring participation in conferences and meetings at a national aswell as international level. Interestingly, then, the market for sign languageinterpreting in conference settings (cf. Nilsson 1997: 554; Séro-Guillaume1997) is largely conditioned by educational interpreting in the community,which is one of the most important sub-fields or specializations of interpretersfor the deaf (cf. Seal 1998).

Apart from the pioneering achievements of U.S. sign language interpret-ers, impressive progress towards professionalization has been made also in afew other countries, most notably Sweden, where a liberal view of non-Swedish-speaking persons’ right to an interpreter was enshrined early on inlegal provisions. From the mid-1970s, full-time interpreters have been em-ployed by local authorities throughout the country for work in medical, legal,public-service, religious and, not least, educational settings (cf. Nilsson 1997:552f). While in Sweden the emergence of interpreting as a profession islargely driven by institutionalized service provision rather than the efforts of aprofessional body, it is remarkable that, in contrast to most other countries(and similar to Australia) there is considerable linkage between communityinterpreters for signed and spoken languages. (The Institute for Interpretationand Translation Studies at Stockholm University is solely responsible for —though of course not providing — all interpreter training in the country, andboth spoken language and sign language interpreting services are made avail-able on a centralized basis by a number of municipal authorities.)

Another interesting example of the relationship between institutionalforces and interpreters’ collective efforts is the United Kingdom, where thereis an Association of Sign Language Interpreters (ASLI) which does notcontrol either the register of qualified interpreters or the code of ethics. Unlikethe RID, ASLI has to look to a body called the Council for the Advancementof Communication with Deaf People (CACDP) for crucial decisions affectingstandards of practice and ‘registration’ under a multi-level system of National


Vocational Qualifications (cf. Heaton & Fowler 1997).In Germany, moves toward professionalization have largely been spear-

headed by the Institute of German Sign Language and Communication of theDeaf at the University of Hamburg. Following makeshift ‘examination’ andtraining measures since the early 1980s, the first full (two to three-year)training course leading to a university diploma in sign language interpretingwas established in Hamburg in the mid-1990s (cf. Schulz 1997). At around thesame time, continuing education-type courses for practicing sign languageinterpreters were launched at the (conference) interpreter training schools ofthe universities of Geneva (Switzerland) and Graz (Austria). For an account ofthe situation in France, see Fournier (1997).

The picture which has emerged above regarding the professionalizationof interpreting with signed languages is necessarily sketchy. Nevertheless, itexhibits the main features which come into play in various constellations:legal provisions, institutional (and not least financial) arrangements for inter-preting service delivery, a certification authority, a professional organization,a code of ethics and standards of practice, and university-level training. Thesefactors are at work in community interpreting for signed as well as spokenlanguages, though their overall effect may vary greatly, as will be seen below.

Migration and Access: The Spoken Language Paradigm

The flagship country — and continent — in the development of communityinterpreting is Australia, where the massive intake of migrants of non-English-speaking backgrounds after World War II, much more so than the significantpresence of Aborigines, turned a staunchly monolingual nation into an ethni-cally diverse society which gradually came to accept and find responses to thecommunication needs of the ‘new’ Australians. The shift of government policytoward multilingualism and multiculturalism in the 1970s, associated with thegrowing political lobbying power of immigrant communities, led to innovativemoves in the area of language services (cf. Chesher 1997: 282ff). Afterdecades of ad hoc arrangements, the Department of Immigration in 1973established a Telephone Interpreter Service (TIS), and a number of initiativeson the state level followed later that decade: In Victoria, a specialist interpreterservice was created to meet the communication needs of schools, and NewSouth Wales organized a mobile force of 27 interpreters to serve 17 Sydney


hospitals. Out of this Hospital Interpreter Program grew the NSW Health CareInterpreter Service, the largest language service in Australia after TIS, employ-ing more than one hundred full-time staff interpreters (cf. Chesher 1997: 286).

Apart from the complex system of interpreting service provision, de-scribed in full by Ozolins (1998), Australia has been renowned for its initiativein creating national standards and a system of accreditation for interpreters. ANational Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI)was established in 1977 and implemented a five-level system of proficiencystandards. Following a revision in 1993, accreditation is now given at fourdifferent levels to Paraprofessional Interpreters, Interpreters, Conference In-terpreters and Senior Conference Interpreters. The category of ‘Interpreter’represents the basic level of competence for (community) interpreting andmay be regarded as the Australian professional standard (cf. Bell 1997). Thefact that the accreditation scheme was developed in the absence of a profes-sional organization (AUSIT, the association of interpreters and translators,was founded only in 1987) testifies to the institution-driven rather than profes-sion-driven nature of standard-setting for interpreting in Australia.

The Australian accreditation system is unique, in particular because itcomprises all types of interpreting (and translating) activity and includesspoken as well as signed languages. Approaches to authorization and certifi-cation of interpreters in other countries are much less comprehensive and tendto focus on a specific type of interpreting or language modality. In the area ofcommunity interpreting, the landmark example is again Sweden, where asystem of state authorization dates back to 1976 (cf. Niska 1990, 1998).Managed initially by the Board of Commerce and now by the NationalAgency for Lands and Funds, the scheme provides for accreditation at a basiclevel and at a specialization level (in court and/or medical interpreting). Thesame government agency also publishes a code of good practice for interpret-ers, drawn up much earlier than the Australian (AUSIT) Code of Ethics.Sweden was also a pioneer in providing training for community interpreters,mostly in the form of short courses at adult education centers and voluntaryeducational associations, with curricular guidance now provided by the Insti-tute for Interpretation and Translation Studies at the University of Stockholm(cf. Niska 1998). The difficulty of offering (community) interpreter training atuniversity level is highlighted by the situation in Australia, where an initialburgeoning of NAATI-approved courses for the paraprofessional and profes-sional (‘Interpreter’) levels was followed by a decline in the late 1980s. By the


mid-1990s, there were only two professional-level courses left — at theUniversity of Western Sydney (formerly Macarthur) and Deakin University,the latter of which has meanwhile been shut down.

The variable interplay of interpreter service provision, training, andauthorization can also be observed in the evolution of community interpretingin Great Britain, where concerted efforts by the Institute of Linguists’ Educa-tional Trust and the Nuffield Foundation early in the 1980s gave rise to both asystem of college-level training for community interpreters (leading to aDiploma in Public Service Interpreting) and extensive efforts at awarenessraising and user education among public service institutions (cf. Corsellis1997). In 1994 the Institute of Linguists established the Register of PublicService Interpreters, which lists free-lance interpreters accredited by the Insti-tute of Linguists (upon completion of a Diploma course or passing the corre-sponding test) for a specialization in legal and/or healthcare and/or localgovernment settings (cf. Ostarhild 1996).

In contrast to the British system of a uniform standard for variouscommunity interpreting specializations, the situation in the United Statesexhibits considerable diversity and is largely driven by legal(istic) constraints.The U.S. Court Interpreters Act of 1978, which mandated a judicial certifica-tion system for the federal level and paved the way for similar measures inindividual states, boosted professional development in the field of courtinterpreting, not least by requiring certified interpreters to engage in furthereducation as offered by professional bodies (such as the California CourtInterpreters Association) or colleges and universities (cf. Mikkelson & Mintz1997). In the area of healthcare, progress toward ensuring and extendinginterpreter service provision was founded on anti-discriminatory legislation,chiefly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (cf. Puebla Fortier 1997). With fewexceptions, such as the certification system introduced by the WashingtonState Department of Social Services, medical interpreters cannot rely on anauthority-driven performance standard. This has given professional organiza-tions such as the Massachusetts Medical Interpreters Association (MMIA) andthe California Healthcare Interpreters Association a more integral part inshaping the process of professionalization, with the MMIA Medical Interpret-ing Standards of Practice (1996) standing out as a particularly noteworthyachievement. Provision for training varies greatly, though; in a survey of sometwo dozen programs in the United States and Canada (Roat & Okahara 1998),most of the courses were found to last only between 6 and 60 hours.


Canada, which shares many of the political, social and linguistic featuresof Australia, has generated significant momentum in the evolution of commu-nity interpreting in the 1990s. Nevertheless, community (or ‘cultural’) inter-preting in Canada has largely been characterized by ‘grass-roots’ serviceprovision and initiatives at the level of individual Provinces rather than anoverarching national policy. Special attention has been given to the creation oflegal and medical interpreting services for indigenous languages (e.g. Roy-Nicklen 1988; Penney & Sammons 1997), and major healthcare interpreterprojects (involving the definition of performance standards, the developmentand implementation of training courses and arrangements for professionalservice provision) have been undertaken by coalitions of healthcare providers,interpreters, training institutions and government authorities in a number ofplaces, including Toronto and Vancouver (cf. Carr 1997).

Whereas most of the developments outlined in this section are set in thecontext of (im)migration, the experiences of countries like Australia andCanada also point to the importance of community interpreting in societieswith ‘indigenous’ multilingualism. Apart from countries like Malaysia (cf.Wong 1990), the most striking example is certainly post-Apartheid SouthAfrica, where community interpreting services are crucial to the vision of anegalitarian multi-ethnic society with eleven official languages. One of theprime movers there has been the National Language Project, which sponsoreda pioneering study on interpreting needs in healthcare settings (Crawford1994) and launched a Community Health Interpreter Training and Employ-ment Programme. (For details on many other facets of community interpretingin South Africa, see Erasmus 1999, forthcoming).

In contrast to the South African situation, the challenges of establishingcommunity interpreting on the European continent seem rather pale. Neverthe-less, a number of countries are lagging behind in many, if not all of the aspectsof professionalization touched upon in the overview presented above. Whilecountries like France and the Netherlands at least have a history of organizedservice provision for their migrant communities, others, like Germany andAustria but also Spain, are only beginning to realize the need for action toensure equal access not only in the courtroom but also in medical and socialservice settings. Much like their neighbors to the West, the countries of Centraland Eastern Europe are concerned mainly, if quite appropriately, with (interna-tional) multilingualism in a growing European Union, and interest in commu-nity interpreting has been focused on professional(izing) court interpreting.


Professionalization: Problems and Prospects

If there is a single overriding theme that can be identified from the necessarilysketchy overview above, it is the tremendous diversity of approaches, con-straints and responses to the challenge of intra-social interpreting needsthroughout the world. This heterogeneity, while hampering my attempt atproviding a compact and coherent historical account, should come as nosurprise, since it is a defining characteristic of community interpreting. Em-bedded in its sociocultural (political, social, economic, legal, etc.) environ-ment and constrained by the norms of (inter)action in specific social andprofessional settings, community-based interpreting, to use a very fittingalternative term, appears in an intrinsically ‘local’ perspective. The pluralityand variability of the forces shaping its practice in a given national andinstitutional context often stand in the way of efforts to achieve a uniformstandard of professionalization for interpreters in the community. Since com-munication and interpreting needs arise in a broad range of situations in thepersonal lives of migrants or deaf persons, it is practically unavoidable that‘natural interpreting’ by family members or friends will persist at least in anumber of less formal circumstances, thus complicating the emergence of auniform perception of the interpreting function on either side of the interac-tion. Where economic considerations prevail over (underdefined) legal provi-sions and integrationist policies, the fuzzy boundary between professional andamateur interpreting is likely to shift in favor of the latter.

Aside from the economics of interpreter service provision as an issue ofoverriding concern, the extent to which community interpreting can emerge asa profession in a given society is determined by a number of higher-ordervariables such as the extent of multilingualism and the legal and social status— and lobbying power — of residents from other language and culturalbackgrounds, the philosophical attitudes toward social change through state,legalistic or grass-roots initiatives, and the political climate for turning consti-tutional guarantees of equal access and non-discrimination into practicalpolicies for integration.

Even where these systemic constraints favor acceptance of the need forprofessional community interpreting services, it is still uncertain which paththe process of professionalization is to take. As evident from the survey of‘selected highlights’ in the previous sections, the evolution of communityinterpreting from an occupation to a profession can be driven by a variable


combination and sequence of factors: publicly funded service provision, oftenthrough centralized agencies; an authority-driven or profession-based systemof accreditation or certification more or less specifying standards of practiceand professional ethics; training programs within (or outside) the establishedpublic system of higher education, and a professional organization withenough power to shape working conditions and professional standards.

While an in-depth analysis of the various pathways towards professional-ization is beyond the scope of this paper, one might conclude that, typically,interpreting services ‘get organized’ (by institutions or community agencies)before practitioners themselves get organized, if at all, to actively and collec-tively shape their professional terms of reference. One of the key issues in thisprocess is the community interpreter’s role in various settings (cf. Roy 1993;Mikkelson 1998; Pöchhacker, forthcoming), and as the task’s demands arespecific to particular institutional contexts, they tend to draw practitionersapart rather than bring them together in a professional association largeenough to find strength in numbers. However, the record of sign languageinterpreters, who work in a very broad range of community settings, wouldsuggest that a uniform code of practice and ethics can be drawn up even in theface of very diverse institution-specific needs and constraints. By the sametoken, training for community interpreters can be designed in such a way as toachieve both a uniform core competence in liaison interpreting (cf. Gentile etal. 1996) and a setting-based specialization, as recommended by a workinggroup within a EU-funded project of the European Language Council (cf.Hertog 1999: 28ff).

Given its rather uneven development over the past decades, the field ofcommunity interpreting has only recently become a focus of cooperation andexchange beyond national boundaries. On the European level, the EuropeanForum of Sign Language Interpreters was formed in 1993; a series of meetingsof court interpreters’ associations culminated in the “Fourth InternationalForum and First European Congress on Court Interpreting and Legal Transla-tion” in Graz in 1998 (Katschinka & Springer 1999), and the first meeting ofEuropean community interpreting agencies, organized in 1995 in Strasbourgwith support from the European institutions, led to the founding of BABELEA,a European association representing the interests of community interpretingorganizations in the EU, which held its first international conference in Viennain late 1999.

On a world-wide level, the growing importance of this branch of the


interpreting profession has received increasing recognition within FIT, whichheld its 1996 World Congress in Australia and in 1999 elected a champion ofcommunity-based interpreting, Adolfo Gentile, to serve as its President. AIIChas also been taking a keen interest in court interpreting and has made effortsto extend its professional standards to that field of activity. Beyond — thoughvery much in support of — professional concerns, the Critical Link confer-ence series in Canada (Toronto 1995, Vancouver 1998, Montreal 2001) hasbeen vital in promoting research and cooperation in the field of communityinterpreting on an international scale.

In his preface to the proceedings volume of the 1995 Critical LinkConference (Carr et al. 1997), Harris (1997: 1f) reviews the evolution of theinterpreting profession as a whole and finds medical and social service inter-preters, i.e. community interpreters in the narrower sense, at its forefront in the1990s. Given their persistently uncertain status, relatively low rates of pay andthe lack of university-level professional training, there should be ample roomfor the evolution of this profession to continue in the 21st century.

University of Vienna

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft of thispaper.

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Documents

Pochhacker - Getting Organized in Community Interpreting