Vicarious Trauma among Interpreters Serving Asylum Seekers and Refugees from the Northern Triangle

Abstract

This paper centers around the emotional reactions by interpreters when hearing and verbalizing in the target language traumatic events narrated by asylum seekers and refugees. It intends to provide answers to the following questions: Are interpreters serving asylum seekers and refugees been emotionally affected by the narrations they interpret, as evidenced by the Compassion Fatigue Self-Test? Are immigrant interpreters more prone to suffer from compassion fatigue? What type of topics do English-Spanish interpreters identify as more emotionally troublesome when interpreting for asylum seekers and refugees? Twenty-one participant interpreters took the Compassion Fatigue Self-Test (CFST), which included the job burnout risk test, and answered a survey via the Qualtrics platform. Results indicate that the immigrant interpreters showed a greater risk for compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, especially those who had experienced trauma in their home country. Wilcoxon Rank Sum/Mann-Whitney U test revealed a significant (p=0.044) difference in mean CFST scores between immigrant and non-immigrant interpreters. In contrast, non-immigrant interpreters scored at an average of extremely low risk for compassion fatigue. The job burnout risk provided a closer range of results, with an average moderate risk of job burnout among immigrant interpreters and low risk for domestic interpreters. Taking into consideration the CFST results of the non-immigrant interpreters, there is a need for interpreters working with asylees and refugees to be aware of the risks of vicarious trauma and have access to debriefing meetings with trained personnel when especially emotionally difficult cases take place.