Interpreting in Mental Health Settings Training, Manchester

26th - 29th June 2008

At: Kings House, Conference Centre, Manchester

9.30am – 4.30pm each day, Thursday 26th to Sunday 29th June 2008

A four-day training course for Registered, Qualified BSL/English Interpreters, Language Service Professionals and appropriately experienced relay/Deaf interpreters. Presented by: Robyn Dean, MA, C.I./C.T., of the faculty of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Robert Pollard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and director of the Deaf Wellness Center.

Following on from the one-day workshop held on 4 December 2007, this four-day course on Interpreting in Mental Health Settings will equip qualified BSL/English Interpreters and experienced relay/Deaf interpreters with the skills necessary to work in Mental Health settings. The course will cover working within the UK framework.

In order for the interpreting profession to advance, it must conceptualise interpreting work in a different way. It must articulate and embrace a new schema – a schema that is expansive enough to include not only the technical aspects of interpreting work but the human and social aspects as well. Since their first publication in 2001, which described the basic structure of their Demand-Control Schema for Interpreting Work, Dean and Pollard have postulated that interpreting is a practice profession and that the traditional emphasis on the work’s technical aspects has created numerous myths and misunderstandings about interpreting.

These myths can be problematic in any type of interpreting assignment but they are particularly troublesome in mental health settings. Addressing and dispelling these myths is essential. Many times, correcting these misunderstandings means the difference between effective and ineffective evaluation and treatment outcomes for deaf consumers. In this course, Dean and Pollard will address these interpreting myths and present the fundamentals of their demand-control schema. This new schema serves as the scaffold for their broader practice-profession perspective on interpreting in the unique mental healthcare setting.

After familiarising the audience with the demand-control schema, Dean and Pollard will use the schema to explore the nature of mental health service settings and the implications these settings hold for interpreters and effective interpreting work. Among the topics that will be examined are: (1) how expressive and receptive language abilities can be directly altered by mental illness and pragmatic interpreting approaches for addressing such issues, (2) details of various mental health service settings and what unique interpreting challenges can be expected therein (e.g., psychiatric emergency rooms, inpatient units, psychotherapy sessions, psychological testing appointments), (3) the consequences that certain translation decisions and assumptions can have for mental health treatment, especially when the hearing and deaf consumers are unaware of the nature of and reasons for interpreters’ decisions, (4) how interpreters’ tendency to suppress personal feelings and reactions can lead to both translation and occupational health problems when that suppression and the stress it induces are not recognised and dealt with appropriately and (5) how the practice of professional supervision can maintain a professional’s development and ethical aptitude.

• Conference Flier (word doc)
• Biographies (word doc)
• Book Your Place on the Interpreting in Mental Health Settings Training Course (word doc)

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