ABSTRACT
This chapter is an exploration of participation in language discordant social work meetings. The two main questions that are addressed are who participates, and how do they participate. Looking at service-user participation, the chapter focuses on how clients participate in responding to initiatives and questions from social workers, and in participating with their own initiatives. Throughout the chapter, variations in participation, engagement, and involvement in language discordant meetings are explored. In the meetings that are explored, language discordance significantly hampers participation. Rather than requesting repetition and clarification when there is a language barrier, minority language speakers tend to be muted and silenced. However, in interpreter-mediated meetings, minority language speakers are able to participate actively, similar to the participation displayed by clients in language concordant meetings. The challenge for participation in interpreter-mediated meetings is that if interpreters are not sufficiently skilled and competent in the task of interpreting, the participation of minority language speakers is frequently not conveyed in full by the interpreter in the interpreted rendition.
