Prof. Dr. Ineke Crezee
Based on my background as a translator, interpreter, health professional and interpreting and translation researcher, I will explore the role of Community Translation in the promotion of health literacy. I will share some of my experiences as a Fulbright New Zealand Scholar (Public Health) at the Center for Diversity and Health Equity at Seattle Children’s Hospital in Seattle, WA. Next I will explore the concept of health literacy and the many factors which impact on this, focusing also on the refugee and migrant populations for whom we translate and touching on some of the many barriers to accessing health information. I will briefly outline different approaches to Translation Studies in general, involving a product or process approach, before moving to reception studies involving a participatory action research approach in the area of health translation. I will then move to my own preferred approach to community translation as part of health promotion efforts, providing glimpses into the different experiences that took me there. I will explain my belief that sometimes a little is better than too much and how this requires working with the commissioners of the translation, who may need persuading that densely printed pamphlets may not be the answer. I will finish by exploring what we might need to do to achieve ‘just right’ when engaged in CT for the purposes of health literacy and how this should involve the end-users of the translations – whatever form this might take.
Bionote
Ineke Crezee, PhD, is Aotearoa New Zealand’s first full Professor in Interpreting and Translation at Auckland University of Technology. In 2020 she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, for services to interpreter and translator education.
Ineke completed a postgraduate degree in Translation Studies at the University of Amsterdam, with James Holmes as one of her lecturers. She also completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English language and literature and trained as a registered nurse in a large general hospital in Amsterdam, interacting with many migrant patients. After arriving in New Zealand in 1989 she became involved in developing health interpreting courses on the heels of the large cervical cancer inquiry. She has published extensively on interpreter and translator education and continues to work as a translator, interpreter and educator. Among her publications are Introduction to Healthcare for Interpreters and Translators (John Benjamins, 2013) (a special iteration for Spanish-speaking interpreters and translators appeared in 2015), Multicultural Health Translation, Interpreting and Communication (Routledge, 2019), and “Action research and its impact on the translation and interpreting classroom” (Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics) and Interpreting in Legal and Healthcare Settings: Perspectives on research and training (John Benjamins, 2020).