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Sandra Hale

Short bio

Dr Sandra Hale is Professor of Interpreting and Translation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has a long career as Spanish interpreter, educator, and researcher. She is a pioneer in community and court interpreting pedagogy and research and is recognised internationally as an authority in the field. She was made Fellow of AUSIT (the national professional association) in 2013 and awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa in Interpreting and Translation Studies from the University of Antwerp in recognition for her innovative research in community interpreting, in 2014. Her books The discourse of court interpreting and Community interpreting are widely used as text books nationally and internationally, with the latter translated into Spanish and into Japanese. 

For more details go to: https://hal.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/people/sandra-hale/

Abstract

Moving Boundaries through community interpreting research
Community Interpreting research is relatively recent, with the bulk of it concentrating on court interpreting and medical interpreting, and for the most part using discourse analytical and ethnographic methods. Most research has used relatively small samples and has been descriptive and qualitative in nature. Such research has been instrumental in advancing our knowledge of the complexities of community interpreting and has crossed the boundaries into the practice by informing the training of community interpreters for the past two to three decades. This presentation will describe some of the recent research conducted by the author, which has crossed methodological, disciplinary, and professional boundaries. The research projects into court, police, and medical interpreting used mixed quantitative and qualitative methods from the fields of interpreting, linguistics, law, psychology, and health, using large samples. This research not only describes practice but also analyses its effects on all participants. The results have been used to recommend policy changes as well as to educate medical and legal practitioners on how to work effectively with interpreters. Thus, interpreting is pushing the boundaries of its own academic and professional community into the wider community with which it interacts.