But I don’t want an interpreter!

You’ve gone to all the trouble of finding a professional interpreter for your limited-English client, and then they tell you they don’t want one. What do you do now? First, you need to ask yourself a question: “What about me – do I need an interpreter if I am to do my job effectively?”

Fundamentally, you need to decide if it is really the client’s decision to make. To illustrate, consider two relatively common situations:

1. “My daughter/son/brother will help me.” The client insists one of his family members can interpret. He doesn’t want to cause you any bother, and it will cost you nothing.

2. “I don’t want the community to hear about this – I’ll bring my friend to interpret.” The client is embarrassed about her situation, and is very worried that the rest of her close-knit community will hear about it. Using her best friend as the interpreter will put her at her ease – why not go along with her?

There are good reasons to avoid agreeing to your client’s proposal. In situations where a family member or friend is on offer:

• Can you be certain that they have the level and depth of vocabulary in both English and the other language to interpret everything fully and accurately?

• Do they understand that they must not filter out anything – even if they don’t feel comfortable passing it on?

• Will either of them try to “improve” the client’s case by polishing their words into something more coherent or believable? Will they add things they think will help, or leave out details that they consider unhelpful or irrelevant?

• Do the “helpers” have their own agenda – omitting or adding details for their own benefit?

• On top of all that, can you or your client be sure that the family member or friend will actually keep things confidential?

Actually, you don’t know and have no way of checking – and certainly no-one to follow up with should things go wrong. As a professional yourself, doing your job effectively means knowing that you’re getting the complete story from your client, and vice versa – full and accurate, nothing omitted, nothing added. When you use a trained interpreter, bound by a code of ethics, you can be sure about accuracy, sure about impartiality, and sure about confidentiality.

The best way to respond to your client is to tell them that you need the trained interpreter – and you could give them some of the reasons above.