Building trust between speech pathologists and interpreters in the assessment of aphasia

Background: Where a person with aphasia and the treating speech pathologist come from different linguistic backgrounds, an interpreter is often called upon to facilitate the clinical assessment. Previous research has documented the challenges that multilingual aphasia assessment can pose for both interpreter and speech pathologist. These challenges highlight the importance of interprofessional trust for an effective collaborative partnership. Aim: Our aim is to understand how provider-interpreter trust–as an activity-specific practice–develops through interactions in aphasia assessment sessions. Methods & Procedures: Extracts from two interpreter-mediated aphasia assessments involving speakers of two different languages (Tagalog and Greek) were selected from a larger corpus. Using interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis, we identified particular interactional choices and patterns that contributed to the building of rapport and trust between the interpreter and speech pathologist. Outcomes: Analysis revealed that participants invoked a range of interactive frames during the assessment sessions. Using the Framework of Provider-Interpreter Trust (Hsieh et al., 2010), we were able to demonstrate how socio-relationally oriented frames and clinically oriented frames can both serve the practice of trust building. Conclusions: Interactional features that reflect shared goals between the interpreter and speech pathologist, as well as acknowledgement of professional boundaries, can foster trust. We argue that there is scope for trust to be further enhanced by providing space for the interpreter to offer cultural insights relevant to the speaker’s lifeworld that may be unfamiliar to the speech pathologist. We also argue that much of this work would be best achieved during dedicated pre-session briefings and post-session debriefings.