Resumen de Intercultural aspects in the training of interpreters for public services
Eva Reichwalderová, J. Belková
This paper focuses on the issue of interpreter training, specifically public service interpreting which is used by schools, hospitals, police stations, various public offices, etc.In an increasingly globalised world we are witnessing the phenomenon of migration which, because of the way it occurs, sometimes results in the loss of human life. Immigrants with the desire to start a new life leave their culture and embark on an adventure in search of economic, social or political well-being in a foreign country about which they often know very little. Once they have overcome the danger, which the journey often represents for immigrants, they come up against other obstacles such as: xenophobia, ignorance of the legal norms or culture of the host country. A major problem is often the language barrier, which can be overcome to some extent by well-prepared and trained interpreters.In this paper we try to present the (in)sufficient training of future interpreters for public services, also called community interpreters, both in Slovakia (the authors' country of origin) and in Spain, since Spanish is their second working language in interpreting classes. These findings resulted from a survey on the assistance of interpreters in the daily work of police officers conducted in one of the provincial departments of the Slovak Police Force.The linguistic and (multi)cultural conditions and situations that interpreters must face require specific training that should be carried out already during their university studies. We specify such a process in the paper by proposing a series of activities and exercises that will help future interpreters to get a better orientation on the subject of community interpreting and related legislation, emphasizing that a translator or an interpreter is not only a person who masters languages but at the same time acts as an intercultural mediator and therefore has to develop a complex of competences: linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence and cultural competence.
