Interpretação médica: análise bibliométrica de TCC, dissertações e teses publicados no Brasil

Abstract

The demand for interpreting services in healthcare settings has been increasing in Brazil because of the foreigners who come to this country and the millions of natives who do not have Portuguese as their first language, such as deaf and indigenous people. However, this increase in demand has not been followed by a substantial academic interest, considering that there are not many studies about this topic developed in Brazil. This study aims at conducting a bibliometric research on the academic production about medical interpreting in Brazil using Google Scholar as database and the software Publish or Perish to retrieve the citation metrics of TCCs, dissertations and theses published in this country. This research corpus is made up of 10 academic texts selected among 452 retrieved from the initial search. These quantitative data were analyzed considering the following indicators: type; publication year; author and supervisor; institution; city/state. After that, a qualitative study was conducted in which all 10 texts of the corpus were read, and some excerpts from them were selected in order to exemplify the most common challenges faced by medical interpreters. Finally, some comments were made about possible solutions for the problems mentioned in the papers and faced by the interpreters in order to try and contribute with medical interpreting recognition and professionalization in Brazil.