Interpreting as Practice: Applying Schatzki to Interpreter-Mediated Mental Health Communication

Effective communication is central to mental health care, yet in multilingual settings such as the Mental Health Service (MHS) of Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), it can be strained by language barrier and the routine use of ad hoc interpreters to bridge it. Research across HMC and beyond suggests that the use of ad hoc interpreters creates challenges both inside and outside the interpreter-mediated encounter. Understanding how these encounters are organized and experienced therefore requires a theoretical foundation that can attend to both the flow of interaction and the institutional conditions that shape it. This chapter reviews several relevant frameworks, including the Cultural Competence Model (Campinha-Bacote, 1996, 2002), Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles, 2016), and Bourdieu’s practice theory (1977, 1986, 1990), before turning to Schatzki’s site-based practice theory (2002, 2010, 2012) as the most suitable for the aims of the study. Schatzki’s account of practice as a nexus of doings and sayings organized by practical understandings, rules, teleoaffective structures, general understandings, and material arrangements provides the analytical grounding needed to explore triadic communication as it unfolds within a specific organizational site. The chapter demonstrates how this framework informs the development of four research questions focused on communicative disturbances, teleoaffective structures, shared practical understandings, institutional rules, and material configurations.