Özet:

This study seeks to focus on the image of the fictional interpreter in Jhumpa Lahiri's (1999) "Interpreter of Maladies”, in parallel reading with various academic discourses on healthcare interpreters in Turkey. Translated into Turkish in 2000, Lahiri’s story hints at the fact that mediation differs from interpreting by virtue of its adjacent roles, such as conflict resolution, patient advocacy, and empowerment. Lahiri’s construction of the interpreter’s image in the story not only underpins various academic studies in Turkey concerning the difference between the profile of community interpreters and that of intercultural mediators, but also serves as a fruitful case in point to corroborate the ensuing image of healthcare interpreters. The fact that migration and displacement turned translators and interpreters into mundane figures of daily life, which has in turn led to the emergence of translators and interpreters as protagonists in literature and film, marks a symptomatic recurrence of fictional translators and interpreters in translation studies scholarship. The fictional translators and interpreters reflect how people consider such issues as manipulation, loyalty to the source text or speech, power struggles, the effect of gender roles on translation, and so forth. The present study concludes that the image of healthcare interpreters built by various academic discourses in Turkey dovetails with the image of the fictional interpreter in Lahiri’s short story in that interpreters oftentimes serve as patient advocates since interpreting in healthcare settings includes various roles subsumed under the profile of intercultural mediation. The study further notes that healthcare interpreters who straddle impartiality and advocacy tally with the stereotypical image of the interpreter in-between constructed in the story.

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