How Interpreting Enhances Professional and Corporate Experiences at Khin Family Services
On today’s blog, we want to share a recent success story that has inspired positive discussions within our team. We hope that it inspires interpreters and other businesses to gain a different perspective on the role of a professional interpreter.
Who is Khin Family Services?
Khin Family Services is an independent social work service based in Redhill, Surrey, that provides residential assessments for parents and families to ensure that they can offer appropriate care to their children.
Khin’s staff team has a wide variety of specialities and skills, primarily within social work, social care, childcare, and mental health.
Khin Family Services found themselves in a situation where they noticed that several families didn't speak English as their first language, which interfered with the assessments they had to conduct. Nonetheless, they found a solution by hiring professional Vandu interpreters to accompany parents and serve as a two-way point of information for both members of staff and families.
What is the role of professional interpreters in this setting?
To best understand the experience of interpreters working in these environments, we interviewed Mariana Robinson, one of Vandu’s Portuguese interpreters, who has been involved in supporting families at Khin for the last three months.
Mariana explained that she interprets for a mother under assessment at Khin Family Services. Mariana’s role involves shadowing her during her stay at the residencies, including playground sessions, counselling groups, meetings, individual sessions, and even visits to the local park, shopping, and medical appointments.
“In order to carry out those sessions with her, they need an interpreter” comments Mariana “Because they are judging her ability to parent, they need to know what she’s saying to her child, how she’s communicating”.
Differences to a regular interpreting role
One of the reasons why the success of these interpreting jobs caught our attention, was their uncommon nature and characteristics. These are some of the factors embedded in the work at Khin:
Length: The work with Khin Family Services involves day jobs, with interpreters spending 5 to 10 hours on the job, as opposed to the usual average of 1-2 hours for an interpreting session.
Mariana expressed her opinion saying that “those long hours are good because it’s one chunk of your day and job done. You don’t need to go from A to B, or do lots of little jobs here and there”.
Lower Percentage of Active Interpreting: Interpreting jobs usually require professionals to be interpreting for most of the time. However, at Khin Family Services, this process is slightly different.
“At Khin, you are not necessarily speaking the whole time, and even from day to day it changes because you are following someone in their normal daily routine. Some days there will be lots happening, lots of sessions, lots of conversations, sort of non-stop. Sometimes, it’s just very quiet, the person I interpret for is not doing very much, not saying very much, so you are required to interpret less” adds Mariana.
Commute: For professionals accustomed to several commutes to reach their face-to-face interpreting jobs, the experience at Khin has been phenomenal. They are only required to commute to a single place, and the ratio between the cost of their transport and income from the job is much better since they are paying the same amount for transportation with a higher rate of working hours and, therefore, higher pay for the day.
Continuity: freelance interpreters usually work on a job-to-job basis, with no guarantee that they will work for the same person or company more than twice.
Even though this is part of the regular nature of the job, for some of our interpreters, it has been refreshing to be allowed to follow up on someone’s case for several weeks.
Mariana provided insight into this matter too:
“Some of the jobs you get are very involving and very serious and really intense, but you don’t know what happens. You work with that person two days and then never see them again and have no idea what the outcome was… so it’s good to see the evolution”.
Further Comments
While discussing the reasons behind the success of the day jobs at Khin, we noticed two additional important points in our conversation with Mariana: the intensity of the job and the personal enrichment.
Being in a place where interpreters might do their job in challenging situations, they must have the emotional strength to keep up with its implications.
“It’s a really charged environment, it’s not the most relaxing place” says Mariana, “you need to speak for that person for the whole day, and if she’s interacting with other residents there could be some conflicts”.
She soon related these comments to a positive aspect:
“I didn’t even know that places like that existed. It was a completely new experience to me, so I’m really enjoying it” adds Mariana, “there have been court cases and there are lots of different agencies involved, so we’re learning so much about the system, little details about the system that you wouldn’t know otherwise”.
Interpreting roles at Vandu Languages
We decided to take on the challenge of documenting this story with the hopes that it can be a source of inspiration for people considering a professional interpreting role.
By becoming an interpreter, you can support others in minority communities to access public services and be your own boss with flexible working – all while earning over double the National Living Wage.
Our sister company, Diversity Resource International, is currently accepting applications for their upcoming Community Interpreting Level 3 Course.
If you work for an organisation interested in using interpreting to improve your relationships with clients, we invite you to explore our Interpreting Services, where you will find further information about the services we offer.
If you would like to contact us click here.
