Interpreter Checklist

What Is This Checklist For?

Genogram work with language mediation is not a two-person but a three-way setting: practitioner, client, and interpreter sit together in the room, and everything said passes through an additional person. This changes the pace, the shaping of the relationship, and the way symbols and questions land — regardless of how experienced the interpreter is.

The checklist singles out three points where this matters in practice: who is addressed and who translates, whether the translation of the symbols captures their professional core, and how sensitive topics are handled. This checklist organizes the pre-meeting, the session, and the debrief into three concise blocks so that nothing gets overlooked. Responsibility for the framework stays with the practitioner throughout — even though, in the room, it is mostly the interpreter who speaks.

What’s Specifically Inside

Four points for the pre-meeting with the interpreter — the process, the most important symbols, topics likely to be sensitive, and the translation convention (consecutive or summarizing). Eight points for the session itself, including addressing the client directly, a realistically scaled time plan, keeping cultural markers in mind, the interpreter’s stated duty of confidentiality, and — if the interpreter and the client come from the same community — explicitly naming an alternative language mediator before sensitive topics come up. Three questions for the debrief — these are directed at the interpreter, not the client.

The printable form covers two pages with header fields for client/family, date, the interpreter’s name, language, and the agreed translation convention, plus its own note line for each point. A seven-part adaptation checklist for the first time it is used in practice rounds out the template.

What It Doesn’t Do

The checklist organizes the process around language mediation — it does not train interpreting technique and does not replace briefing the interpreter on their own role. For complex or highly burdened cases, contacting specialized bodies for language and cultural mediation, as named in the sources, is recommended.

Where the Content Comes From

The checklist deliberately cites only specialist bodies and reference works as its basis, not individual people or placement agencies: the Bundesweite Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sprachmittlung im Gesundheitswesen (BUMF, the Federal Working Group on Language Mediation in Healthcare), the DGSF’s Department of Intercultural Counseling (DGSF — German Association for Systemic Therapy), the socialnet lexicon (a German reference lexicon for social work), entry “Interpreting,” Wikipedia, entry “Community Interpreter,” and Carl-Auer Verlag, a publisher specializing in systemic-therapy literature.