Communicating National Disability Insurance Scheme–Exploring Interpreters’ Perspective

This article reports of a study on 19 Australian community interpreters and their experience in facilitating mediated communication in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which was introduced in Australia in 2016. These interpreters were among those who attended a training workshop comprising of a pedagogical segment explaining this new scheme in detail, and a hands-on segment to translate a selection of NDIS terms into their target language to highlight possible linguistic and cultural challenges they may encounter. The training aimed to enable the interpreters to facilitate NDIS communication with clients from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in ways that make sense to their culture and experience. The purpose of the current study is to understand the extent the participant interpreters applied their learning in NDIS communication, and their perspective about specific challenges in this new contextual area, where certain concepts and terms may be hard to translate, and the understanding of disability may be culturally bound. The aim of the study is to deepen the understanding of multicultural communication in disability services, and to inform similar future professional development during major changes to systems in the disability sector, and more broadly in health and welfare.