While the use of hand gestures in first contact as a means of communication is fascinating, one might assume that after prolonged contact between two groups of people, hand gestures would be replaced by interpreters, or people simply learning the other language.  To a certain extent this is true.  In a study on cultural competency in Malaysia and Thailand, researchers found that people from groups that had frequent contact with the Thai language had an easier time navigating healthcare, in part because many of them knew the language. “Familiarity with the health system was attributed to length of stay and existing social networks. With the exception of new arrivals, the Rohingya were perceived to have greater system familiarity and better language ability than other groups such as the Chin.” Despite this, hand gestures are still employed in these hospital’s when interpreters aren’t present. “Doctors had several ways of mitigating language barriers with migrant workers, ranging from use of Google translate to sign language or gestures to try and bridge the language gap.”  It should be noted that in the case of hospitals, where precise communication between doctor and patient could mean the difference between life and death, Hand gestures, while useful, are not an adequate replacement for interpreters. 

There are a couple of reasons why hand gestures are still employed even after lengthy contact between two cultures.  One of these reasons is that the longer two cultures are in contact with one another, the volume of their interactions tends to go up, while this does mean people have more opportunities to learn each other’s language and become interpreters, the number of interpreters rarely becomes large enough to meet the demand.  Another reason why Interpreters don’t replace hand gestures is that hand gestures are remarkably useful even when an interpreter is present.  In other words, they don’t get replaced by interpreters, they simply became a useful tool for them.  Jennifer Gerwing and Shuangyu Li’s paper “Body-oriented gestures as a practitioner’s window into interpreted communication” describes research into doctor patient communication over a language barrier.  The research conducted focused on how hand gestures were used to increase the quality of communication, they found that “Gestures served an important semiotic function: On average, 70% of the doctors’ and patients’ gestures provided information not conveyed in speech. When interpreters repeated the primary participants’ body-oriented gestures, they were highly likely to accompany the gesture with speech that retained the overall utterance meaning. Conversely, when interpreters did not repeat the gesture, their speech tended to lack that information as well.”  This perfectly demonstrates the usefulness of hand gestures and how they are excellent tools for interpreters.

Pocock, Nicola Suyin, et al. “Moving towards Culturally Competent Health Systems for Migrants? Applying Systems Thinking in a Qualitative Study in Malaysia and Thailand.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 6 Apr. 2020, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0231154.

Gerwing, Jennifer, and Shuangyu Li. “Body-Oriented Gestures as a Practitioner’s Window into Interpreted Communication.” Social Science & Medicine, Pergamon, 26 May 2019, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619303107.