Gestures in The Hands of Interpreters

While the use of hand gestures as a substitute for verbal language in the case of a language barrier is indisputable and well documented one might assume that hand gestures are only necessary in the initial stages of contact and that as contact is prolonged more people will learn each other’s language and act as interpreters. 

To a certain extent this is true. In the same study on cultural competency in Malaysia and Thailand, researchers found that visitors to Thailand from groups that had frequent contact with the Thai language had an easier time navigating the local healthcare system, 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… 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 because interpreters aren’t always 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.”  This is because interpreters are difficult to train.  It takes more than just knowing another language to be an interpreter, it is a skill that requires understanding of how both cultures communicate, and in the case of medical interpreters it requires knowledge of context specific vocabulary related to a very information dense field, that being medical care. While contact between cultures tends to make more people multilingual, this pool of informal or ad-hoc interpreters cannot be relied on for a variety of reasons, the article “How Language Barriers Impact Patient Care: A Commentary.”, describes these issues well. 

An untrained interpreter, also known as an ad hoc interpreter, may include a family member(s), housekeeper(s), or secretary. Timmins (2002,p. 89) mentioned, “.. .ad hoc interpreters can lead to inaccurate communication and ethical breaches.” Ethical dilemmas that arise with the assistance of ad hoc interpreters include role conflicts and patient confidentiality. A patient may use their child as an interpreter adding a tremendous amount of stress to all involved in the conversation, especially when the content is sensitive and disrupts the family relationship.

Referring back to the study on migrant healthcare in Thailand, the study reported that there were attempts to learn the other language.

Just one doctor in Malaysia mentioned learning migrant languages in order to communicate (MD-1). While in Thailand, short courses for health workers were provided by Provincial Health Office, MOPH, teaching basic communication in Burmese related to health issues and cultural differences. However, there were concerns about time constraints to attend courses. Burmese accents were difficult for doctors to pick up because of different accents among ethnic groups in Myanmar.

This demonstrates the difficulty of training interpreters. 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.

It is also important to keep in mind that in most cases it is not just two cultures interacting as is the case in countries like South Africa where eleven official languages are spoken, the previously cited article states that “a single interpreter will not be able to comply with the 11 official languages and foreign languages
additionally encountered.”

I believe this hints to one of the reasons why interpreters don’t replace hand gestures, the longer two cultures are in contact with one another, the more they interact. 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 a remarkably useful tool for them. It is well documented that hand gestures can be used to greatly improve the clarity of speech, both in normal speech and interpreted speech. They are useful aids when describing things, and they have even been found to help the gesturer.

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.

Hand gestures have also been shown to have positive effects on the speaker. Robert M. Krauss’s paper Why Do We Gesture When We Speak? presents research on these positive effects

A lexical gesture’s duration is closely related to how long it takes the speaker to access its lexical affiliate… If lexical gestures facilitate lexical retrieval, preventing speakers from gesturing should make lexical retrieval more difficult…It seems clear that gesturing facilitates the production of fluent speech by affecting the ease or difficulty of retrieving words from lexical memory.

I would go further to suggest that if gestures are a useful tool in lexical retrieval, then that means they would be immensely useful in learning and speaking another language, thus making them an even more useful tool for interpreters.

References

Gerwing, J., & Li, S. (2019, May 26). Body-oriented gestures as a practitioner’s window into interpreted communication. Social Science & Medicine. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619303107

Hewes, G. W. (1974, April 4). GESTURE LANGUAGE IN CULTURE CONTACT. Gallaudet University Press. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.rowan.edu/stable/pdf/26203092.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A96a64e3c92470323313aebe843658f0e&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&origin=&initiator=search-results&acceptTC=1

Pocock, N. S., Chan, Z., Loganathan, T., Suphanchaimat, R., Kosiyaporn, H., Allotey, P., Chan, W.-K., & Tan, D. (2020, April 6). Moving towards culturally competent health systems for migrants? applying systems thinking in a qualitative study in Malaysia and Thailand. PLOS ONE. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0231154

Galvano, F. Beyond Borders: An In-depth Analysis of Cultural Variances in
Non-Verbal Communication Through Gestures and Hands https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francesco-Galvano/publication/377396770_Beyond_Borders_An_In-depth_Analysis_of_Cultural_Variances_in_Non-Verbal_Communication_Through_Gestures_and_Hands/links/65a41c3dc77ed94047784212/Beyond-Borders-An-In-depth-Analysis-of-Cultural-Variances-in-Non-Verbal-Communication-Through-Gestures-and-Hands.pdf

King, W. S. (1949). Hand gestures. Western Folklore, 8(3), 263–264. https://doi.org/10.2307/1497931

Stevenson, F. (2014, March 19). Achieving visibility? Use of non-verbal communication in interactions between patients and pharmacists who do not share a common language. Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.12102

Aboul-Enein, F. H., & Ahmed, F. (2006, September 1). How Language Barriers Impact Patient Care: A Commentary. Journal of Cultural Diversity. https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.rowan.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=8&sid=8273a53f-394d-4303-b068-c171102b122b%40redis

Vuuren, C. J. van, Dyk, B. van, & Mokoena, P. L. (2021, October 12). Overcoming communication barriers in a multicultural radiography setting. Health SA Gesondheid. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/hsa/article/view/215925

Corballis, M. C. (1999). The Gestural Origins of Language: Human language may have evolved from manual gestures, which survive today as a “behavioral fossil” coupled to speech. American Scientist, 87(2), 138–145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857812

Krauss, R. M. (1998). Why Do We Gesture When We Speak? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7(2), 54–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182502

Krout, M. H. (1939). Understanding Human Gestures. The Scientific Monthly, 49(2), 167–172. http://www.jstor.org/stable/17039