[If the provision of information runs into the language barrier--about the cooperation with interpreters].

Communication between professionals and patients from different cultural origin and without knowledge of the professional's language is not possible without the help of interpreters. Their presences however, can have a differential impact upon the quality of the interaction. Non-professional translators (family members, members of hospital staff etc.) can have a negative impact upon medical treatment via false translation, most commonly by the failure to add "creative elements" from their own interpretation to what has been said. As a consequence, using professional interpreters is generally preferred. It has been shown that professional translation improves the quality of treatment and patients' satisfaction with treatment. The proper professionalisation of interpretation is a rather recent development in health care, differentiating between various roles that an interpreter might take. The prominent role of a cultural translator often referred to as "mediation" assumes that the interpreter "mediates" between two different cultures that collide during an encounter. In our experience with Turkish speaking interpreters however, their socio-demographic characteristics (foremost education and social class in Turkey) resemble those of professionals much closer than that of Turkish patients; this the interpreter's position is not in the middle between patient and health care provider but skewed to the latter. Using concrete clinical situations we will recommend a word-by-word translation largely neglecting the role of the cultural mediator.