The Bilingual Forum meets twice a year online or in London. There is no charge for attendance at the Forum. If you wish to be added to the mailing list for the Forum, please email: beverley@pasaloproject.org
On July 7th, 2022, we held the 23rd Bilingual Forum for Therapists and Mental Health Interpreters with the theme The aftermath for interpreters in highly demanding emotional situations.
This was the introduction to the Forum meeting:
This event tells a story. It begins with the experience of interpreters and the aftermath from their work on their professional and their personal lives. It ends with an account of effectively addressing this aftermath.
The following texts are some of the presentations which told the story.
- An account from an interpreter called Guida Shields about how the work, interpreting in a Child Protection context, has an impact on her.
- A description by Irina Norton and Beverley Costa of an initiative to support interpreters and a project to train interpreters to facilitate this type of support themselves.
- An account from an interpreter called Marina Burgess who participated in training to become an interpreter-facilitator.
- The experiences of an interpreter called Zora Jackman who, after finishing the training, went on to deliver support to groups of interpreters herself.
If you have any comments or questions, please email: beverley@pasaloproject.org
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Previous Bilingual Forum meetings
Bilingual Forum Thursday November 18th, 2021 (5pm to 6.30pm UK time)
"The Multilingual Experience of Children and Young People" Perspectives from Clinical Psychology and Speech and Language Therapy
Bilingual Forum Tuesday April 13th, 2021
“The languages we use and the languages we lose – implications for psychological therapies”
Language loss across generations Dr Susan Samata, author of the Cultural Memory of Language Susan’s current research interests are in the role of language loss, or attrition, as part of a wider ecology of language.
Negotiating the language(s) for psychotherapy talk Dr Louise Rolland, Associate Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London Louise currently lectures on bilingualism at the University of Greenwich.
Bilingual Forum, November 25th, 2020
Adam Schoem (University of Alcalá) gave a presentation from his research: "The Importance of Self-care and Mental Health Education for Interpreters"
Adam shared the results of his research project, and discussed different aspects of work stress, self-care, and methods of learning about self-care for interpreters.
Bilingual Forum 16th June 2020
Languages of survival and pain - how do torture survivors speak of the unspeakable?
The Forum session on Tuesday, 16th June, focused on the linguistic issues for torture survivors and the implications for mental health practice.
First, a presentation and interview with Dr Sally Cook about her research on the language choices of torture survivors within a therapeutic community. In the second part, an interview with Nathalie Talbot, an interpreter with many years of experience interpreting for survivors of torture.
Bilingual Forum for Therapists and Mental Health Interpreters
A National Forum for Bilingual Therapists and Mental Health Interpreters was established in 2010 to share learning and improve standards and practice. The Forum provides a space for ideas, experience, learning and good practice across languages to be shared and to offer a source of support and a network of supervision in a variety of languages.
The Forum meetings focus on a range of issues including:
- Language switching and its meaning
- Languages in which trauma is experienced and in which trauma is recalled
- The possibility of expressing different and additional emotions in different languages
- The interpreter’s role in the therapeutic alliance
- Language as a transitional object
- Language, communication and power
- People’s identities and relationships with different languages