Good communication lies at the heart of health care. It is key to preventing hospital admission, providing appropriate treatment, and facilitating early discharge. Physical, physiological, sensory, psychological, and social changes associated with ageing impact on communicatio,n so that more time and patience may be needed in encounters with older adults.

This chapter explores factors related to communication: factors that affect the professional, factors that affect the patient, environmental factors, factors in the social context, and non-verbal communication. We examine the impact of advancing age and the needs of particular populations, including people with protected characteristics and people with dementia. Language and communication are a major concern in providing services for black and minority ethnic elders. We explore the need to approach people with sensitivity and understanding.

Older people often present with multiple comorbidities. There is a dynamic interaction between physical and mental health; the two may be impossible to separate. Integrated working and effective liaison between professionals and agencies facilitate person-centred care. In direct communication with older people and their family carers, listening is as important as sharing information.

We include two reflective cases to aid personal learning and conclude with tips to improve communication with older adults and with people with dementia.

The chapter covers special bilinguals; that is, those who have both a regular and a unique relationship with their languages. Among them, one finds bilingual writers of literature who express their art in their first language, their second or third language, or even in both their languages. There are also those who make a living from their extensive knowledge and careful use of their languages such as interpreters, translators, second-language teachers, and so on. Others, such as airline pilots and traffic controllers, or foreign correspondents, do not have to reflect on the linguistic aspect of their languages as much but depend on them, as well as on specific skills, to do their jobs. And others still owe a lot to their language proficiency and bicultural abilities to assure their safety, such as sleeper agents. All share many similarities with regular bilinguals, but they are also characterized by a number of interesting differences. The author concentrates on the latter.

Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).

The authors outline areas that need special attention. The purpose of the appointment should be explained, and the practicalities of attendance addressed. The attitude/approach of the clinician is discussed in relation to creating a sense of safety and trust. Individuals may fear authority and may have had experiences they find difficult to disclose.

Confidentiality, safety and anxieties about the assessment are reviewed, as people may have little prior knowledge of the system and have had bad past experiences. Acknowledgement and discussion are crucial. More detailed discussion of working with interpreters follows, as this is an often-neglected area. Pros and cons of ‘remote working’ are reviewed.

Some specific aspects of assessment areconsidered: difficulties in disclosure and how to explore issues such as torture, sexual violence, domestic abuse, moral injury, and rape.

People seeking asylum may be isolated with few resources.Strengths should be emphasised, and sources of support identified, and contact facilitated. Feedback and checking understanding are helpful, and often fosters trust.Scrupulous record keeping is emphasised.

Australian indigenous peoples are among the world’s most incarcerated populations. The nineteenth century origins of this fact lie in Australian legal histories, of the interaction of indigenous peoples and British criminal law introduced in the course of colonisation. This chapter considers first the assertion of criminal jurisdiction in law and statute in the early nineteenth century, paying attention to some significant differences between the colonies. Second, we look at some elements of criminal trial, including the treatment of Aboriginal evidence and the role of interpreters. Third, the chapter examines the importance of the criminal justice system’s putative concern with victimisation and the justice due to victims.Finally we consider some evidence about the system-wide impacts of the assertion of criminal jurisdiction over indigenous peoples, including patterns of prosecution and punishment. Understanding these legal histories makes clear how the legal system’s professed principles of justice and fairness compounded discrimination and disadvantage.

The rapidly growing proportion of older Americans who are from very diverse ethnic and racial minorities will produce an ethnogeriatric imperative for geriatricians and other health-care providers. Many older adults from minority backgrounds experience disparities in the quality of their health care and disparities in their health status by their higher risk for diseases such as diabetes, heart failure, and dementia.

To provide effective ethnogeriatric care for this culturally diverse older patient population, health-care organizations need to become culturally competent by applying the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) in Health and Health Care, including providing trained interpreters for providers to use in care with limited English proficient older adults. The geriatric providers themselves need to become culturally competent in their: (1) attitudes such as developing cultural humility and reducing their bias; (2) knowledge of cultural values and health risks of their older patients; and (3) skills in showing culturally appropriate respect, eliciting patients’ explanatory models of their illness, and working appropriately with interpreters.

News translation is generally meant for a broad, mainly lay audience. As Chapter 20 explores, the challenge here is less a divide between lay and expert text user, and more the fact that much news translation is undertaken by non-professional translators, namely journalists themselves. This particularity makes news translation an integral part of non-professional interpreting and translation. The chapter discusses the organizations that translate news and outlines the stages of text production at which translation occurs. Finally, it offers a glimpse into the past to the beginning of news translation, with the birth of newswires, and suggests a view of the future of news translation.

This chapter analyzes the language black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of blackness in the distinct missionary scenarios they led. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, the chapter argues that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish or Spanish American texts.

This chapter argues that the policy developed for evangelizing black populations in Spanish America, compared with that of indigenous populations in the same regions, required uniquely validating black interpreters’ roles as evangelical intermediaries. This validation in turn opened a space for important forms of subjectification and authority for black interpreters.