Hanneke Bot. Dialogue Interpreting in Mental Health. Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2005, 293 p.

This book may lead some readers into unfamiliar territory. The author has chosen to investigate issues of translation as they apply to a very specific instance of interpreting. She takes her readers not into the conference hall, as many interpreting scholars have done, nor even into the broader community, as a growing number of researchers are now doing. Instead, she takes us into the healthcare sector, more precisely into the consultation rooms of practitioners who work with interpreters in the area of mental health. In the face of such a highly specific topic, some readers may feel disconcerted. Yet Bot has an important contribution to make to discussions that are currently taking place in Translation Studies as a whole, namely those that revolve around the issues of power, visibility, and the role of the translation professional. Bot’s book presents the material that originally formed the basis of her doctoral research, a study of six interpreted sessions between Dutch psychotherapists and Persian-speaking asylum seekers. In the opening pages of her volume, she explains that her own experience as a therapist who works with refugees led her to wonder both whether interventions in an interpreted session are rendered as carefully and as precisely as therapy requires, and whether there were strategies that could be used to enhance collaboration between therapists and interpreters. To generate answers to these questions, she set out to systematically observe and analyze models of communication behaviour at work in interpreter-mediated therapy. The study is divided into four sections. In Part I, Bot briefly reviews the relevant literature, both in community interpreting generally and then more specifically in mental health interpreting, before outlining in broad strokes the overall design of her study. In Part II, she looks at her methods in more detail. She begins by describing the preliminary interviews she conducted with patients, interpreters, and therapists. The results of these interviews indicated that there are several competing ideas about what constitutes effective interpreting in mental health. Bot uses these ideas to guide her observation of actual therapy sessions, and her methodology for observing the sessions is also provided. In Part III, she analyzes her data by examining how participants managed the therapy sessions, by determining to what degree interpreter’s renditions were equivalent or divergent, and by describing instances in the sessions where communication broke down. Finally, in Part IV, the author provides in-depth discussion on the relative merits of different models of interpreting, and she draws conclusions about the effects of these models. While the four sections offer interesting content, readers may at times find their progress through the book slow-going, for three reasons. First, there are places in the text where grammar and layout need more attention. On occasion, punctuation is incorrect, definite and indefinite articles are problematic, count nouns take the wrong modifiers, and line breaks are inconsistently used to separate paragraphs. Second, explanation is at times in short supply. When the author analyzes her data she presents excerpts of the patients’ utterances in Farsi or Dari, of the therapists’ utterances in Dutch, and of the English glosses of both. However the glosses do not provide enough context for English readers to understand the conversation, and Bot’s clarifications are all too brief. When she draws conclusions about the excerpts, she runs the risk of seeming unjustified to readers. Finally, the transition from doctoral thesis to book is only a partial success. The study is divided into sections, sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections–all presenting discrete and isolated bits of information. What is needed is a more authoritative stance towards the material, so that it is better contextualized and presented …