ABSTRACT
This chapter is an exploration of communicative complexity in meetings between social workers and clients. The chapter compares and contrasts language discordant meetings with and without interpreting, with language concordant meetings. Based on this, the particular complexities found in language discordant social work meetings in contrast to language concordant ones are discussed. Moreover, the chapter addresses differences in communicative complexity between language discordant meetings that are interpreter-mediated and those without interpreting. The main findings are that social workers interviewed for this book generally seemed to overlook and downplay the communicative complexity of their conversations with people. The discussion of the empirical data focuses on how language discordance adds to the complexity of already highly complex institutional encounters between social workers and the people they serve.
