Adopting a critical sociolinguistic approach, Cho’s book examines the lack of social recognition of interpreters in healthcare contexts in Australia, where the profession largely involves migrants providing services for other migrants, despite its critical role in ensuring equality in healthcare. Drawing on interviews with sixty-seven healthcare interpreters, Cho argues that the low status of interpreting in Australia is not merely an occupational issue but a symptom of societal, market, and institutional monolingualism intertwined with hierarchies of language, race, and class.
Starting with two interpreters’ life stories, chapter 1 contrasts the high status of bilingual interpreters in Korea, where English proficiency marks elite status, with the invisibility of community interpreters in Australia, where the norm of English monolingualism renders other languages invisible. It introduces the complex interplay of language, race, and class that leads to the reduction of healthcare interpreting in Australia to a remedial service for deficient non-English speakers, and it rationalizes the use of a critical sociolinguistic approach to examine the under-appreciation of interpreting within Australia’s multilayered monolingualism.
Chapter 2 establishes a monolingual mindset that naturalizes English as superior to other languages. The ideology of monolingualism creates and reinforces boundaries between languages, races, and classes, historically excluding or disadvantaging populations from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The chapter further argues that, despite Australia being a global leader in providing free interpreting services, actual practice, such as in legal interpreting, is undermined by institutional monolingualism, which privileges English as the only legitimate official language and subjects bilinguals to an exclusionary ‘us versus them’ bias.
Monolingualism is examined at societal, market, and institutional levels. Societal monolingualism (chapter 3) is traced through the legacy of the White Australia policy, which used English to enforce racial and social homogeneity. This historical context positioned interpreting not as a prestigious profession, but as a stigmatized welfare service for migrants considered problematic. Market monolingualism (chapter 4) is critiqued in terms of how the labor market treats bilingualism as a non-skill that any migrant can perform, exploiting vulnerable migrant workers and resulting in low pay and precarious employment conditions that rely on interpreters’ sense of ethnic duty. Institutional monolingualism (chapter 5) in healthcare is unveiled through hospital practices and systems that marginalize interpreters, reflecting a mechanistic view that treats them as translation machines rather than as cultural mediators.
In chapter 6, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio, Cho argues that interpreters remain in the profession driven by a moral commitment to helping vulnerable members of their ethnic communities. It details interpreters employing norm-oriented, norm-adjusted, and norm-resistant strategies to perform invisible cultural repair work, effectively prioritizing patient equity. Finally, the conclusion (chapter 7) synthesizes the analysis of societal, market, and institutional monolingualism to reiterate that the under-recognition of interpreting is profoundly embedded in historical linguistic, racial, and class biases. Cho calls for a shift away from seeing interpreting as a mechanistic task, urging institutions to implement mandatory training on language barriers for healthcare providers and to recognize interpreting as a complex, professional practice essential for social recognition, justice, and equity.
