Demand for Pasifika interpreters hard to match

By Sylvia Giles: Pacific Media Centre

Wanted: More interpreters – especially Pasifika - for the Manukau SuperClinic, which is catering for a district more culturally diverse than any other in New Zealand.

Interpreters used by the clinic - essential for the safety of patients and medical staff - include Afghan, Arabic, Cantonese and Vietnamese.

However, the free service is still having difficulty finding qualified interpreters for core Pacific languages, such as Tongan.

The Counties Maukau District Health Board (CMDHB) has more than double the Pacific population of any other district health board.

Pacific peoples make up 21 percent of the board’s population, compared to 6 percent nationally. The district also has a growth rate of 3.2 percent, double the national average of 1.6 per cent.

Carol Cameron, Interpreting Services team leader, is charged with the task of co-coordinating the extensive interpreting service, which also provides interpreters for Middlemore Hospital, courts and police in the area.

“For the safety of the doctors and the nurses, as well as patients, they should be using the recognised source, which is the Interpreting Services,” she says.

“We need to make sure the interpreters who are out there, doing the job, are trained and that we have regular updates with them, regular meetings and that everyone is aware of their responsibilities.

“The risk of using a family member or friend is that they may not understand the situation. They might interpret the wrong diagnosis, or may interpret wrongly,” she says.

“But also there is concern that if there is bad news, or something like that, they may not tell the patient the correct information. That emotion comes into it.”

Trained role
This explains the Counties Manukau policy that any interpreting must be done through their own interpreting services - by trained interpreters.

“We cannot hire anyone without having done the certificate in liaison interpreting,” says Cameron.

While there may be no shortage of Tongan speakers in the area, the lack of speakers with the necessary qualification hinder the ability to provide the service.

“Tongan people seem to be reluctant to do the course,” she says.

At present, they have one point five Tongan interpreter permanently on staff – between all the services they cover – as well as a small pool of casual interpreters.

Ineke Crezee, course coordinator for Translation and Interpreting Studies at AUT University, has found an increased demand for trained interpreters since the course’s inception in 1990.

However, the ability to produce interpreters still rests with the speakers that enter the course.

“We do not always get applicants representing particular languages applying to do the course and if we do, we sometimes find that their command of the English language is not such that they would be able to successfully train to be interpreters,” she says.

Crezee says the high demand for Pasifika language interpreters continues to hold strong, and she has noticed an increased number of Pasifika students coming to do the course.

Samoan legal terms
“This year we have a group of three Samoan students undertaking a legal interpreting paper, which is great because it enables them to discuss the correct Samoan translation of particular legal terms with their language peers.

“Two years ago we had three Tongan students in our liaison interpreting course. However, some of these were taking the paper as part of BA studies and went into alternative employment upon graduating,” she says.

“We get the whole range in terms of age, gender and ethnic and socio-cultural backgrounds, ranging from young second generation speakers of Chinese – whose English may be much better than their Chinese, since they did not complete secondary and tertiary education in a Chinese speaking country – to mothers wanting to train for casual work, to older community leaders with excellent skills in both English and their own languages.

Andrew Gordon, ear, nose and throat specialist at the Manukau clinic, estimates that for a clinic of around 10 to 12 patients he will have one or more that needs an interpreter.

“They are indispensable. Otherwise you just become a veterinary practice, to be blunt,” he says.

“And there are certain types of problems where the medical history is everything, like dizziness or tinnitus which is relatively subjective, unlike examining a lesion,” he says.

Nicky Hopping, surgical booker for the Ear, Nose and Throat Department at Manukau SuperClinic, will book interpreters at the same time as surgeries, and has encountered the lack of Tongan translators in particular.

Cancelled surgery
In her role, the worse case scenario is a cancelled surgery. But the cultural nuances involved with the job on the whole are subtler, making the job of a qualified interpreter all the more crucial.

“Sometimes the family doesn’t want an interpreter. Culturally, they just don’t like an interpreter being in the room” says Ms Hopping.

“Or sometimes, with some cultures, a man will feel protective of his wife and will not tell her the whole story.”

Carol Cameron agrees: “The entire service relies on identifying the need for an interpreter. Unless it is recognised either by the GP, or the person booking the appointment that an interpreter is required, someone may well come in, and struggling with English. They might get half way through the appointment and the doctor might think, ‘This is not going anywhere, I actually need an interpreter.’”

These last minute requests, Ms Cameron points out, are the hardest to fill.

“It is better for us to book an interpreter, and have the patient turn up and say ‘I am OK, I don’t need that,’ rather than us allowing a consultation to happen and maybe the patient walking out and not understanding a word that the doctor said.

“And they need to be qualified so that they understand issues of confidentiality. For the purposes of clinical safety, and medico-legal issues, they are absolutely needed,” she said.

In her experience, most patients felt confident to ask for an interpreter.
“I think the general public will say if they need an interpreter,” she says.

“It is better to do that than for the patient to walk away not really understanding. And if we can’t provide an interpreter, a follow-up appointment needs to be made.”

For any patient, who might already be feeling vulnerable or fearful, being put into the situation of not understanding the doctor would be frightening.

“It is not until you visit a country yourself that you know it’s really hard making yourself known,” she says.

“So, I also too think that we, working in Counties Manukau, need to be aware and if we feel that someone doesn’t understand it is better to check. And if not, ask the patient if they would like an interpreter.”

Sylvia Giles is a Graduate Diploma in Journalism student on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University. Pictured: Manukau Superclinic.

'‘We have a little girl here, come down and work it out'

The year Ofa Donaldson was born, in 1972, there were 3600 adoptions in New Zealand. But rediscovering her Tongan cultural roots was an extra challenge.

By Sylvia Giles: Pacific Media Centre

Proud family photographs hang on the walls of the Donaldson’s Hamilton home - just like houses up and down New Zealand. Ofa Donaldson’s picture is somewhat conspicuous in the family line up, as the only brown face in an otherwise palagi family.

Being adopted may not make Ofa, 36, unique - in 1972 there were 3600 adoptions in New Zealand. It does not even make her unique in her own immediate family, where a younger brother is also adopted, the pair being followed by two biological children.

Yet Ofa’s Tongan lineage stares her in the face.

“It wasn’t like I looked in the mirror one day, and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Mum! I’m brown! What’s going on?’

“It was just a natural thing. I always knew I was an adopted kid. It was just like I was adopted, and Mum and Dad were Mum and Dad,” she says.

“It was really funny around teenage years. Mum would come down to school, and I’d yell out, ‘Mum!’ and my friends would be like, ‘Aye? Your mum is white!’ But for me it was always a fun thing.”

Strictly speaking, Ofa Donaldson’s surname is still Talatala, as her adoption was never made formal.

“Mum and Dad just got a call from social welfare saying we have a little girl here, and would they like to come down here and work it out?”

But Ofa still calls herself Tongan, especially in recent years.

“Going to Tonga and meeting actual family. I never thought it would be so important, but it was. And it was like, wow, this is actually where my family is from.”

Urban Polynesian
Unusual circumstances aside, she is a second generation, urban Polynesian, and like so many others finding her place in the Pacific. The urban Polynesian has grown in influence in New Zealand, particularly as it is growing at a faster rate than the overall population.

It is a trend apparent in New Zealand pop culture, visible across film, music, art and theatre; the latest telling hybrid is perhaps Othello Polynesia, which is just about to hit Wellington at the Downstage Theatre.

David Fane is just one of the figureheads of this movement. He is a host at Flava fm, is one of the brains behind Bro’town, and a mainstay of The Naked Samoans, and Outrageous Fortune.

Born in New Zealand, he sees a big difference between him and his parents’ identity.

“When my parents came out they joined the church straight away, to draw the community around them. My generation doesn’t feel the need to be a part of a specific island group.

“But that’s not a breakdown. There is no way we’d survive if we held on to those ways. You need to adapt.”

It’s a theme through his many projects, depicting “the Samoan I chose to be”. He makes a trip back to Samoa every three years also, initially joking it is important to him for the duty free.

“But no, and for the chance to catch up with family. But you become very mindful of the difference between being Samoan and being a Samoan New Zealander,” he says.

“You become half-bred of both.”

Pasifika heritage
Ofa Donaldson herself made two trips to Tonga in her thirties to discover her Pasifika heritage.
However after two weeks, she was so rattled by the whole experience she decided to come home early, to her “normal family, and flushing toilets and normal food”.

But her trip was to culminate in her meeting her biological father, almost by accident. In the network of Tongan families that is now woven across the Pacific, she bumped into the sister of a Tongan colleague from back home in Hamilton.

“She knew I was coming to Tonga, but I hadn’t told her when. And that’s how we met my Dad. Because she said, ‘Your Dad is here, he was been waiting 34 years to met you.’”

“It was really emotional. He cried. He could hardly speak any English. So it went me, translator and then him,” she says tracing out their positions on the kitchen table with an index finger, indicating the interloper placed between them.

“Until then I had only heard it from my mother. He explained how he got deported, how he wrote lots of letters to people he knew in New Zealand to try to find me.

“He wants you to know he hadn’t forgotten about you, the uncle explained. And he and my mother weren’t talking so she didn’t tell him where I was.”

But the voluntary pilgrimage still didn’t make the imprint of being forced to meet her birth mother as a 12-year-old child, an experience she describes as “bizarre”.

Her adoptive mother had been upset for the week leading up to it. Ofa Talatala, after all, was still a foster child.

Her Dad, on the other hand, she described as being “a typical English, middle class male: no emotion, just pat, pat, it will be ok”.

Cultural contrast
Which runs in stark cultural contrast with the next piece of Ofa’s storytelling: “When we left [her birth mother’s house], I remember her coming out of the house and standing under the tree, and just wailing,” she recalls.

“I was just like ‘get me out of here’. But it must have been so emotional on her part.

At the time I was like, ‘Oh, my god, how embarrassing, who does that? But for her it must have been grieving. And no shame in it for Tongans, I guess”.

So where does Ofa Donaldson take her cultural cues from in such situations, whether she be adult or child, in New Zealand or in Tonga?

“I really don’t know. It has been cool going back to Tonga, and seeing where I am from, but I think I am so heavily engrained in New Zealand culture.

“It’s not like I am going to drown myself in Tongan stuff now. Some people would, but I am happy to know that I am Tongan, and I’ve been there and met the people.
“I’m happy. Just putting the tapa up, I’m like, ‘that’s me!’”

Sylvia Giles is a Graduate Diploma in Journalism student on the AUT Asia-Pacific Journalism course. She took the photograph of Ofa Donaldson at her home in Frankton.

Othello Polynesia

New website tackles high cost of Pacific money transfers

By Sylvia Giles: Pacific Media Centre

High fees for wiring money to the Pacific through banks or agencies such as Western Union erode the earnings of Pacific migrant workers.

A new website, www.sendmoneypacific.org has been launched this week as a New Zealand aid project in a bid to make savings for Pacific families and economies.

The new English-language website - a joint venture between AusAID and NZAid with the slogan “all the information you need to send money to the Pacific” - compares costs as well as time delays, exchange rates and transfer methods.

It shows, for example, that NZ$200, sent from New Zealand to Samoa with TSB Bank, incurs a fee of $65.37, while taking two to three days to be transferred.

Westpac, using the same search criteria, carries a fee of $5.98 and takes less than an hour with the use of a pre-pay card.

The website also allows users to sign up for updates for specific countries.

There is also a plan to move into print, across different languages, in order to target workers who don’t speak English.

Sendmoneypacific.org was launched at the Otara Markets by Pacific Island Affairs Minister Georgina te Heuheu on Saturday.

‘Safety net’
In a media statement, the minister described remittance payments as an important “safety net” for some families.

World Bank senior economist Dr Manjula Luthria says money-transfer companies took $190 million from the remittances flow to the Pacific in the past financial year.

The World Bank website cites international best practice as having remittance fees between one and five percent. Money roaming the Pacific, from New Zealand and Australia, incur fees on average between 15 and 25 percent.

The former Labour-led government announced last August at the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in Nuie that its aim was to bring fees to between 5 and 7 percent by 2009 through increased regulation.

However, the new policy under the present government leaves the fate of these fees to the market.

According to sendmoneypacific.org, figures reveal the remittances income as a staple, rather than disposable income as it may be perceived to be.

Remittance payments make up 24 percent of Samoa’s national gross domestic product, bringing the country $128.2 million a year. It is their single biggest source of income.

In Tonga, remittances are equally crucial. In Fiji, since the collapse of both the tourism and sugar industry, remittances bring in more income than the two industries combined.

In-kind transfers
Remittances are defined by the World Bank as “transfers of cash formal and informal, households’ bills paid by the migrant to a third party, and in-kind transfers”.

In a report released in 2006, research carried out in Tonga and Fiji showed that 79 percent of remittances were cash transfers.
In Tonga, 75 percent all remittances were made through fee-based bank or “other” money transfer agencies (such as Western Union).

In Fiji, 69 percent of remittance payments were made using these channels.

In the past, there has been little alternative for the speedy transferring of money.

Remaining forms of transfers were listed as money being physically transferred by the migrant or a friend or a visit to migrant, through a shop, through the mail or “other”.

However the use of these methods was high enough for the World Bank to note that any “official” figures, compiled by banking networks, were unlikely to be truly reflective of actual figures of remittances reaching the Pacific.

Sylvia Giles is a student journalist on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.

Send Money Pacific