ABSTRACT
Having established that participation in language discordant social work meetings is often communicatively challenging, this chapter focuses on how the communicative interaction in these meetings transpires. The communicative interaction in interpreter-mediated meetings is different from what can be seen in language concordant meetings, and in language discordant meetings without interpreting. Compared to non-mediated communication, interpreter-mediated talk has several distinguishing features and inherent complexities. In addition to perceiving utterances and rendering them in the other language, interpreters also need to participate in the coordination of conversational turns. This entails interjecting to interpret at the appropriate moments in a conversation without fragmenting the talk, and without missing out on content. Ideally, all those taking part in interpreter-mediated communication need to share some common ground on what this form of interaction involves. The chapter gives particular attention to what transpires in situations when social workers and interpreters seem to have different ideas about what should be said and by whom, who should do what, where people should be, and how the physical and communicative space should be organized. The complexities of these interactions are explored by looking at the diverse ways in which social workers, clients, and interpreters interact in language discordant social work meeting.
