On the distribution of responsibilities in treating critical issues in interpreter-mediated medical consultations: The case of “le spieghi(amo)”

•The paper deals with the organization of interpreting in medical interactions.•The rendition of medically critical issues is an interactional accomplishment.•Doctors authorize mediators to take charge of the explanation of critical issues.•Distribution of responsibilities in interpreted talk is a communicative achievement.

This article examines sequences of interaction involving Italian doctors, English-speaking patients and language mediators serving as interpreters in bilingual talk. In interpreter-mediated interaction, language mediators participate with the main purpose to translate talk; there is thus normally no need for the current speaker to ask the mediator to translate. In the data presented here, however, doctors recurrently ask mediators to relay what they are saying to the patients. They do so by introducing turns to translate with items like “le spieghi” (“explain to her”) or “le diciamo” (“let's tell her”). Such turn structures seem to have the dual function of: (a) signaling that the issue dealt with in the doctor's turn may be critical, delicate or unusual in some way; (b) projecting an involvement of the language mediator to do “something more” than simply translate, e.g. explain or deal with the criticalities signaled by the doctor, “re-designing” them for the patients. The organization of these sequences highlights dynamics which orient the distribution of the rights to knowledge between doctors and mediators and consequently their responsibilities for performing certain actions in interpreter-mediated talk.