Alumni Testimonial #18 - Here Are the Coping Mechanisms Interpreters Need to Deal With Vicarious Trauma

John Richard Stokbak Sciabà, certified interpreter and translator of Norwegian, English, and Spanish, and founding member of the Norwegian Interpreters Association, spoke at the online event. He explained the immediate and long-term effects any embodiment of emotions may have on interpreters drawing on the literature and on some of his personal experiences — interpreting at the Breivik case, a Norwegian terrorist trial, as well as other court cases involving heinous crimes.

The Cost of Caring

According to Stokbak Sciabà, numerous studies have shown that repeated exposure to traumatic stories and information can have some psychological consequences for interpreters, such as the following:

• Emotional choking – acute impairment of mental skills because of emotional reactions (i.e., fight-flight-freeze response);
• Vicarious trauma – cognitive change resulting from empathic engagement with trauma survivors, causing alteration in beliefs about safety, trust, and control;
• Secondary traumatic stress – natural and consequential behavior and emotions from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced by a client, stress resulting from helping or wanting to help a traumatized or suffering client, behavioral symptoms that mirror post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in primary victims of trauma;
• Professional burnout – physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual exhaustion resulting from continuous exposure to persons who are vulnerable or suffering;
• Compassion fatigue (or “cost of caring”) – emotional and physical fatigue due to empathy (combines secondary traumatic stress and professional burnout).

The aforementioned psychological consequences may be affected by some general as well as interpreter-specific risk factors, Stokbak Sciabà added. 

General risk factors include pre-existing conditions (such as personal trauma history), high workload, suppression of emotions, organizational setting, bureaucratic constraints, inadequate supervision, lack of availability of client resources, lack of support from colleagues, and agency culture. (The latter is defined as an accepting culture that helps alleviate the stigma professionals may have about feeling inadequate or incapable of completing work.)

Interpreter-specific risk factors include limited control of work situations, lack of peer support while working alone, the need to suppress feelings and express those of others, and the limited acceptance of own emotional reactions and the interpreter’s role (i.e., only interpret).