The Center for Immigration Studies found that over 60 million residents in the United States speak a language other than English in their home, based on 2018 U.S. Census data (Ziegler & Camarota, 2019). California has the largest percentage of residents speaking a language other than English at home (45%), and New Jersey is the 4th in line with 32% of their residents speaking a language other than English at home(Ziegler & Camarota, 2019). Further, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality “Nearly 25 million people in the UnitedStates (8.6 percent) are defined as limited English proficient (LEP), meaning that they speak English less than "very well."
Most of these people will end up needing access to public services for health care, legal assistance, social welfare and education, among others. This growing multilingual context, with large numbers of immigrants, results in social workers increasingly working with service users that do not master the dominant institutional language or with whom they do not share the same linguistic or cultural codes. Hence, inevitably most professional social workers need to resort to interpreters, language and/or cultural mediators. Therefore, social workers, as resources of support, and interpreters as sources of connection to that support, will continue to be critically important in helping to ensure equity and access to resources, often that are vital to one’s quality of life. However, as Hsu points out (2016), the number of ethnic minority social workers in the USA is still scarce.
Further, despite the fact that the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers recognizes cultural humility as one to be underscored, generally neither social workers nor interpreters receive specific training or are informed about the content, codes of ethics or procedures of the work their colleagues perform, resulting in misunderstandings, suboptimal processes and problematic power and trust relationships. Unfortunately, most times the ones suffering the consequences of these issues are usually the service users. The present project aims to examine the current undergraduate and graduate curricula of the School of Social Work as well as the certificates (currently in Spanish and Korean) and MA in Translation and Interpreting (Spanish only) at the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers New Brunswick, though we do not exclude examining other programs from Rutgers Newark and Camden, or other NJ universities. This curricular examination will uncover how students wishing to enter both fields of professional interpreting and social work practice are prepared through their educational programs(i.e. course readings, lectures, student-facing events) to work with one another in an interdisciplinary capacity. A literature review will also be carried out to identify the elements that should be addressed when training interpreters that work with social workers, and social workers that work with interpreters. The final product will be r a curricular proposal in both disciplines, as well as the implementation of such proposal.
Further, instruments such as surveys, interviews or observation of encounters, before and after the implementation, will be used in order to cater for a better design and to evaluate the success of such interventions.