Working with Interpreters in Psychological Assessment

Working with interpreters during psychological assessments and therapy is often an underutilised and commonly misunderstood area of clinical practice.

I have provided training on this to clinical psychology trainees for the University of Sheffield and within the NHS. It’s worth sharing this Minority Mental Health month; here is what I wish every clinician understood before they walked into that room…

The interpreter is not a translation tool. They are a co-professional. It is important to work collaboratively. Their role is not simply to convert words from one language to another. They can convey important non-verbal information.

They can explain cultural, linguistic, and religious subtleties and metaphors that change the meaning of what a client is saying.

They maintain neutrality and their own professional boundaries under significant pressure.

This is a skilled and demanding role and yet many clinicians are expected to treat the pre-session briefing as optional. It is not.

Before you begin working with the interpreter it is important to talk about how you will work together. Interpreting for a psychologist is likely to be different to other interpreting roles and you will need to talk about the aim of the session, the importance of speaking in the first person, your respective roles and boundaries, the communication process, and that everything must be translated.

It will also be important to give a health warning because this work has an emotional impact, and that impact needs somewhere to go.

This brings me to the post-session debrief. This is the part that is most often skipped and yet vital. It is the place to review, things you might have missed (e.g. due to cultural differences) and how you might work better together.

After a difficult session it is important to remember the interpreter has heard what you heard. They have held the same distress, the same disclosures, the same weight. Sometimes the weight is heavier as it might trigger traumatic experiences they have had. They need space to process their own thoughts and feelings, review what happened, and information about how to access support if necessary. Skipping this is not neutral. It is a clinical and ethical gap.

There is also something that rarely gets named: a client being assessed through an interpreter may not disclose fully because they fear the interpreter (who is from the same culture/language group/country of origin) will judge them.

The fear of being known, or of information travelling, is real and it shapes what the client says and does not say. In my experience of working with torture survivors, many clients feared information leakage through an interpreter could genuinely place them or their family back home in real danger.

Before the session even begins, the contextual factors matter: language, country of origin, gender, age, political affiliations, religion, migration history.

These are not background details. They are clinical data.

Culturally informed practice is not a box to tick. It is the difference between an accurate assessment and one that misses what matters most.