Interpreting in child welfare

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For the first time, the research project „interpreting in child welfare“ is investigating the complex realization of interpreted care planning conferences and education advisory. Although quantitative studies indicate a high need for action when it comes to the use of interpreters in child welfare procedures, it is still unclear how the mutual understanding between the actors can be ensured. The project works on this (inter)national research desideratum and, for the first time, makes the discourse of 'community interpreting' usable for children’s services research. The aim is to provide well-founded insights into how interpreted counseling sessions can succeed in the specific setting of educational assistance and can be designed to suit the service user. The findings should contribute to the further development of interpreted children’s services. For this purpose, the central procedures of child welfare – primarily care planning conferences and, in contrast to this, education advisory – are analyzed with a conversation-analytical approach. The data collection will also focus on interpreted interactions with computerbased language assistants. In order to cope with the complexity of the subject matter of the study, a videographic approach is pursued. This approach makes the parallel utterance modalities of the interpreted interaction sequences accessible to analysis. In addition, workshops with the participants are conducted in order to take into account the so far disregarded perspectives of the foreign-language clients. The data collection consists of two phases. First, interpreted care planning conferences will be focused. In a second step the data collection will be extended to interpreted child guidance talks with contrasting constellations of actors in the sense of theoretical sampling (Glaser/Strauss 2005). For practical research reasons, the sample is limited to Arabic and Persian languages. The analysis is based on a multimodal conversation analysis and focuses on the conversational practices, which are used by the social workers, interpreters and clients to establish and organize their social reality and interaction. The conversational practices will be investigated in a repetitive process of sequence and collection analysis. This allows for a systematic comparison of the interaction order of both settings. The final work step plans to review and discuss the research results in a joint workshop with interpreters and social workers, in order to increase the transfer of insights into professional practice.