The relationship between role-shifting and errors in nurse-interpreter dialogue with Spanish-speaking patients.

Interpretation in the United States is a profession of variance. In some places, healthcare employees double as interpreters when needed, and are called dual-role interpreters. Previous studies focused on error production and clinical consequence in interpreted medical consultations (Flores et al., 2003; Flores, Milagros, Pizzo Barone, Bachur & Lin, 2012; Nápoles, Santoyo-Olsson, Karliner, Gregorich, & Pérez-Stable, 2015). This study analyzed 30 transcriptions of video-recorded consultations of Spanish-speaking patients using dual-role nurse-interpreters. The goal was to better understand the contexts of error production by understanding the roles dual-role nurses played when generating the errors. The errors examined included omission, addition, and substitution, which are common in interpretation (Flores et al., 2003, 2012; Ana M. Nápoles et al., 2015). The roles or “voices” included in this study were those of nurse, interpreter, and fellow human, adapted from Cordella (2004). This study contributes to the literature on error production in dual-role interpreters in order to inform future training for nurse-interpreters by describing underlying reasons for some of their errors.