A Brief History of Greenlandic Healthcare Development and the Teaching of Interpreting

Abstract

Under geographically exceptional conditions, healthcare in Greenland began evolving with the Danish colonial rule three hundred years ago. As the healthcare system also relies on foreign expertise today, you can still find the Greenlandic people and patients in a role similar to the colonial days. This can be seen in the consultation conversations, where a Danish doctor usually meets a Greenlandic patient. In this situation, the interpreter plays a central role. At a course for healthcare interpreters, the students are made aware of this. They are also prepared to intervene in order to bridge cultural gaps and historically founded asymmetries and made aware of the significance of critical, creative and self-confident interpreters. To this end, we find that the student’s learning should be based upon elaborating, performing and evaluating role-plays where the students work together in a frame where the agency is distributed to the students. For the same reason, students may choose the language they find most appropriate at any time.