CIMAS project researchers Gema Rubio-Carbonero, Claudia Vallejo and Valeria Tonioli attended the sixth edition of the European Colloquium on Gender & Translation, a meeting point for both translation and interpreting studies and gender studies.
In their presentation, Fostering gender-sensitive Healthcare mediation: gynecological visits of female patients with midwives and husbands as non-professional mediators, Rubio-Carbonero and Vallejo addressed language barriers in healthcare contexts. More specifically, they focused on the impact of these barriers on women of migrant origin in female sexual and reproductive health consultations.
A multimodal analysis of observations in consultation was also presented and it unveiled various communicative practices enacted by health professionals, patients, and patients’ husbands as non-professional linguistic intermediaries. The study of these practices sheds light on the double vulnerability experienced by these women. Often unaware of the sociolinguistic and sociocultural context of the host society, they are likely to be excluded from conversations and health care related to their own sexual and reproductive health.