Interpreting

For torture survivors navigating systems and procedures in unfamiliar environments, language can be a significant barrier. Interpreting therefore plays a pivotal part in the treatment and rehabilitation offered at the Medical Foundation.

Many of the MF's 75 interpreters have fled the same wars and the same oppressive regimes as our clients, giving them a genuine understanding of what people have been through, and the difficulties of starting again in a strange country.

Cultural interpretation is equally as important as linguistic interpretation. The more an MF interpreter can furnish the clinician about the background, as to why the client might be saying what he or she is saying, the better.

Interpreters, who work in some 50 different languages, facilitate communication in a unique way. Part of their role is to help engender a spirit of trust between all three people in the room - the client, the clinician and themselves - if the client is to feel able to talk freely about the torture that has been endured.

Interpreters are carefully matched with clients not only according to language and gender, but also dialect, and where possible, region, to ensure the highest level of understanding and accuracy.

MF's interpreting services manager, Clarisa Carvalho, says: "Apart from good language and interpreting skills, interpreters must also be committed to the people we are trying to help. Sometimes that can be even more important than a language certificate. They have to sympathise with the work."

Gulalai Baqi has first hand experience of the impact of political violence. She was forced to flee Afghanistan after a chain of events that began with the murder of her father, a prosperous wine and cigarette merchant held to ransom by the mujahedeen, and the subsequent torture of her politically active older brother.

Gulalai understands the desperate measures that people are sometimes forced to take to flee and knows too how terrifying it can be to get caught up in a country's bureaucracy without the language skills to cope: "I have been through a lot, but some of those we help have been through so much more."

In 2006 more than 9,500 MF sessions took place with interpreters. As well as the major languages offered, Farsi (Iran), Turkish, Amharic (Ethiopia and Eritrea) French, Lingala (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Arabic, there were many lesser-known languages too such as Beriya (Sudan), Yazioli (Russia) and Fula (West Africa).

Using the skills of some interpreters, the MF has now offered other health workers training in working with interpreters to help torture survivors. In addition, a code of practice for both clinicians and interpreters has been written, establishing the boundaries both should observe during a session.