Interpreting Communication with Migrant Children in a Pediatric Service

This paper presents the results of research on migrant children’s participation in pediatric consultations mediated by interpreters. For this purpose, it has drawn on two types of studies. First, it draws on studies on pediatric monolingual consultations showing the challenge of supporting children’s exercise of agency and the importance of their parents’ authority in producing knowledge about children’s health problems. Second, it draws on studies on public service interpreting showing how interpreters coordinate bilingual interactions, exercising agency, thus promoting migrant patients’ agency. However, no study has yet focused on interpreters’ coordination of pediatric consultations involving children who do not speak the language in which these consultations are produced. Against this background, this paper analyzes audio-recorded data in a pediatric service and addresses how some Italian cultural mediators, working as interpreters, coordinate communication that involves pediatricians, migrant children, and their parents. The paper illustrates how these mediators’ exercise of agency during pediatric consultations can support both the pediatricians’ efforts to involve the migrant children by asking them questions, and the children’s attempts to exercise agency by taking initiatives.