ABSTRACT

More than half of the world’s displaced population has moved to urban or peri-urban areas, and in Brussels, the superdiverse Belgian and European capital, the emergency care sector provides an important setting for analysing the multilingual challenges faced by health practitioners. To gain a better insight in the interactional dynamics of emergency department consultations with immigrant patients, this paper focuses on multilingual strategies that include ‘ad hoc’ communicative solutions used in the absence of professional interpreters (lingua franca use, non-verbal communication, medical translation software, language mediation through companions or hospital staff). Despite their efforts, the participants in our two case-studies lacked the linguistic and interpreting subtleties needed to perform complex linguistic-interactional tasks, and in this way, a form of ‘false fluency’ was created. Ad hoc multilingual solutions, significant as they are, require additional language support to avoid diagnostic insecurity. At the level of patient management, a ‘linguistic assessment’ of patients could potentially be integrated into the triage process, and clinicians should be trained on how to recognise and remediate communication problems under the specific conditions of the emergency department.

摘要

世界上一半以上的流离失所人口已迁移到城市或城郊地区，在布鲁塞尔这个超级多元化的比利时和欧洲首都，急救部门为分析卫生从业人员面临的多语言挑战提供了重要环境。为了更好地了解急诊科与移民患者会诊的互动动态，本文重点介绍多语言策略，包括在没有专业口译员的情况下使用的“临时”交流解决方案（通用语言的使用、非语言交流、医学翻译软件、通过同伴或医院工作人员进行的语言调解）。尽管他们付出了努力，但我们两个案例研究的参与者缺乏执行复杂的语言交互任务所需的语言和口译技巧，并以这种方式创造了一种“虚假流畅”的形式。Ad hoc 多语言解决方案虽然很重要，但需要额外的语言支持以避免诊断不安全。在患者管理层面，对患者的“语言评估”可能会被整合到分诊过程中，临床医生应该接受培训，了解如何在急诊科的特定条件下识别和纠正沟通问题。