Travelling from Ukraine to Portugal with a stowaway called covid-19: A critical case study in telephone interpreting

Abstract

The concentration of people in a family environment and international travel are two of the main ways in which the coronavirus, responsible for the great pandemic of our recent history, can spread, and it was a mixture of these two accelerators of the spread of the virus that led to the critical case that we want to present. At the end of October 2020, a Ukrainian-Portuguese family was unable to get together in Portugal when one of the family members presented severe symptoms compatible with covid-19 in Spain and required urgent hospitalization. This led to the isolation of another of the travelers with mild symptoms in a hotel in Spain, while the rest continued their journey to Portugal. None of the members of the family unit spoke Spanish and they were attended to by Osakidetza (the Basque Country Health Service), using the telephone interpreting service contracted from Dualia Teletraducciones, which operated in Portuguese-Spanish and Ukrainian-Spanish combinations. In this article, we analyze in depth the conversations held via telephone interpreting between patients and nurses, doctors, trackers and professional interpreters of Portuguese and Ukrainian, based on the critical case study methodology (Lian, 2001; Page & Meerabeau, 2000; Perry, 1997); from the hospitalization and isolation of family members until they were discharged and returned to Portugal. We specifically address the cultural elements, reflecting the asymmetry between the speakers and the impact that these two blocks of elements had on the transfer of information by the telephone interpreters.