Multilingual Practices and Monolingual Mindsets

Focusing on health care interpreting in Australia, this book examines the under-recognition of interpreting from a critical sociolinguistic perspective encompassing language, race and class.

Interpreters play an important role in promoting diversity and inclusion but why is interpreting not properly recognised? Cho grapples with this question by focusing readers’ attention to developments in interpreting following increased migration in an English-monolingual Australia, a context in which other languages and speakers have been historically under-valued. Through compelling analysis and the voices of health care interpreters in Australia, this groundbreaking book explores how issues with interpreting are fundamentally issues of justice that affect minority languages and their speakers. Covering diverse professional and social spaces of interpreting, the book discovers linguistic, racial and class hierarchies embedded in English monolingualism and their impact on multilingual practices and populations. From both historical and contemporary perspectives, the book critically investigates monolingual practices from the past and tensions between enduring monolingual ideologies and multilingual realities, suggesting specific ways to overcome monolingual mindsets to make societies more inclusive.

This volume will be of interest to students and scholars in interpreting studies, health communication, intercultural communication and sociolinguistics.