Supporti di mediazione linguistico-culturale bi- e plurilingui a carattere dialogico per migliorare la qualità della comunicazione in ambito medico/ospedaliero

Language barriers between healthcare professionals and patients can have a negative effect on both the quality and efficiency of medical assistance, and especially in situations involving large numbers of individuals who are not speakers of the local languages (refugees, migrants, but also tourists), appropriate professional language mediation services are often not available. The need to find a solution that would allow us to overcome, at least partially, the communicative problems in such settings, was the starting point for an interdisciplinary project (medicine – translation studies) aimed at investigating the potential of plurilingual script-based communication tools. The paper will discuss the results of two empirical studies concerning the evaluation of already existing materials on the one hand and the creation and optimization of model dialogues in plain language on the other.