| Summary: | The aim of this study was to investigate how the presence of the interpreter as a third person affects the meeting between social secretary and client. The study has been conducted through semi-structured interviews based on social secretary's experiences of interpreted meetings and experiences of power. The respondents are multilingual and have experience of participating in interpreted meetings where they themselves have been able to interpret the language. We have analyzed our empirical data based on Foucault's theory of pastoral power. In our empirical data, we found that it tends to be more difficult for social secretaries in interpreted meetings to create relationships and guide their clients, and thus the pastoral power loses its most fundamental principle. The triangular power theory that arises in interpreted meetings makes the relationship creation more difficult as the interpreter could have the opportunity to prevent or distort the information that is conveyed between the social secretary and the client. We have also found that all three parties in the conversation carry various factors into the meeting that can affect the situation in different directions, examples of factors can be age, gender and ethnicity. The social secretaries are aware of the influencing factors that can occur in interpreted meetings and have developed various tools and strategies to be able to respond to this. However, the social secretaries believe that it is difficult to pay attention to clear deficiencies in interpreted meetings when one cannot speak the language.
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