The impact of culture on the community interpreter’s role has been widely discussed in literature. While culture mainly emerges as an issue, and the parties involved in public service interpreting recurrently claim that it is an important factor causing uncertainty, it has rarely been the subject of research as such. In fact, although interpreting is described as a form of intercultural communication, it is not always clear what is understood by “culture”. Drawing on ten semi-structured thematic interviews with interpreters and service providers working in Finland, I analysed their subjective views on culture and culture-specific communication styles. First, the analysis shows that the interviewees find it difficult to provide an explicit definition of the concept of culture, but they also implicitly construct culture as difference represented particularly by the foreign language-speaking client. Second, culture is seen as manifesting itself especially in communication problems when the service providers and their foreign-language speaking clients lack sufficient knowledge of the wider context or do not share the same communication conventions. Analysed through the prism of interactional sociolinguistics, the miscommunication may result from mutual misinterpretations of contextualization cues used by the participants in interpreter-mediated interaction, which professional interpreters are not necessarily immune from. Indeed, interactional sociolinguistics has shown that individuals’ notions of culture are constructions that are unconsciously operationalized and reproduced in social interaction. Despite being aware of cultural differences, participants mostly rely on their socio-cultural assumptions and interpret others’ actions based on their own interaction conventions, which may lead to communication breakdown (Gumperz, 1982). Notwithstanding the inherent risk of miscommunication in all intercultural communication, the interpreters’ codes of ethics mostly describe interpreters as language conduits, who successfully solve communication problems and ensure understanding between the parties (Wang, 2017: 104).

Peer reviewed