Effect of and experiences with interpretation and translation services in the public sector
Mapping review
|Updated
A systematic literature search and mapping of studies on the effect and experiences with interpretation and translation devices in the public sector on users, staff or society.
Key message
The Directorate of Integration and Diversity commissioned a systematic literature search and mapping of studies on the effect and experiences with interpretation and translation devices in the public sector on users, staff or society.
We conducted a systematic search of relevant databases and Google Scholar. The search was completed in October and December 2014. Two researchers independently assessed the identified references for relevance based on predefined inclusion criteria. Potentially relevant references were sorted according to study, population and intervention characteristics.
Resultater
We identified in total 20 382 references. We assessed 177 of these as possibly relevant.
- We identified seven relevant systematic reviews. We also identified 22 experimental studies, 55 observational studies, 43 qualitative studies, 33 studies that used discourse analysis to examine the meeting between staff and client, two studies that used document analysis and one study that used mixed-methods. Fourteen studies did not describe the study design.
- The majority of the studies were conducted in the health sector (158). The remaining studies were conducted in welfare/social sector (7), court (3), with police (3), emergency services (1), or many sectors (3). In one study the public sector was not specified.
- Most studies were conducted in North America (80). The rest of the studies came from UK/Ireland (18), Scandinavian (8), Europe (8), Australia (6), Asia/Africa (6) or multisite (2). Forty-nine studies did not describe the land in which they were conducted.
- We identified too few experimental studies to conduct a systematic review of interpretation and translation interventions within the social services
We have sorted and listed all possibly relevant references, but we have neither read the papers in full, critically appraised their methodological quality, nor synthesised their findings.