抄録
The number of foreigners in Japan has been increasing steadily and they now constitute over 1.6 % of the population. Many of them lack fluency in the Japanese language and need interpreters to interact with providers of medical, legal, and administrative services. The present study focuses on issues faced by medical interpreters. Nineteen medical interpreters were interviewed in depth, and this paper considers how they perceive themselves in terms of status, roles, and motivations. Their self-reported data indicate that (1) medical interpreters have an ambiguous and uneasy status, somewhere between being professional and volunteer, (2) their role goes beyond a language mediator at medical setting; they find themselves advising patients and helping them to negotiate the social service bureaucracy, etc., and (3) medical interpreters feel that their financial compensation is not commensurate with the responsibility of their position, and they perform their work always to some degree in the spirit of volunteering.
