Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges

One of our therapists writes about the importance of therapists training to work with interpreters, to help break language barriers, and build bridges of communication with the families we support.

Given the rich diversity of the communities we work with, it is unsurprising that at times we need to make use of interpreters to support our therapeutic work.  The families who we may need this additional support for are newly arrived in the UK - asylum seekers, or first generation migrants - where parents have learnt functional English but are not yet fluent and children often are bi or trilingual and fluent in both their 'home languages' and English, and also for deaf clients.

Surprisingly, learning how to work  with interpreters as a therapist is not routinely covered in therapist training.  Introducing a 'third'  person, who is not therapeutically trained into the therapeutic space comes with a number of challenges.  Concerns around forming a therapeutic alliance with the client, confidentiality, boundaries, transparency, consistency, safety of the client, all need to be considered when working with interpreters.  Most therapists learnt how to work with interpreters through doing, picking up ideas along the way, but many of us lacked confidence in whether we were 'getting it right'.

We were therefore extremely fortunate to attend an in-house training session earlier this year, delivered by Dr Beverly Costa, author and founder of the National Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum. 

Beverly has a depth of knowledge and experience in this area and tailored this superb training session to the specific needs of the therapeutic team.  We left the training feeling much more confident about working effectively with interpreters.  We were able to think together as a team as to the shared dilemmas and learn from each others experiences.  Beverly gave some really useful tips on how we as therapists can still hold the frame of the session, build therapeutic alliance with the client and ensure the boundaries of professionalism, confidentiality and transparency are maintained.  Her most helpful top tip for me was stating at the outset of the session to everyone present that 'everything will be interpreted'.  This ensures there are no aside conversations.

Being able to offer therapy to clients who are not fluent in English through the use of professional interpreters is an important part of our inclusive offer as an organisation.  The training has allowed us to feel more confident in being able to work professionally and collaboratively with interpreters to ensure the best possible outcome for the families we support.