Marjukka Nisula, Senior Lecturer, Humak UAS
The goal of this presentation is to present speech impairment interpreting services in Finland. The interpreter services for the disabled aims to promote the possibilities of persons with hearing impairment, vision and hearing impairment or speech impairment to be active members of society on equal terms with others. (The Social Insurance Institution, 2023)
Interpretation services are provided and paid mainly by Kela (The Social Insurance Institution). In spite of that there are several laws in Finland that obligate organizations to provide interpreting services for the people who have difficulties to understand written or spoken Finnish used by authoritaries. These laws are for excample administrative law, medical law and a law of social welfare. The organisations are obligated by law to pay the full costs of interpreting services.
Finnish Sign Language interpreting is well known in the sociaty. The interpreters of intralingual interpreting using augmentative and alternative communication, AAC – tools are not that well known in the field. Interpreters are still considered as personal assitants of disabled people. This misunderstanding belies a picture of a person with speech disability, that person is not able to make his/her individual descicions without any intelligence help or guidence. Interpreting services make possible for individuals with speech disability to be seen as normal individuals who are responsible for their own decision.
Interpreters elucidates unarticulated speech or augments fragmentary speech. Interpreters guide the tempo of the discourse between each participant. Interpreters support reading and support writing. Professional interpreters are faith full to interpreters professional ethics. There are several reason why people with speech impairment should use educated professional intepreters instead of family members and personal assistants.
References
Rubio-Carbone, G. 2021. Communication in Persons with Acquired Speech Impairment: The Role of Family as Language Brokers. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jola.12340
Humak University of Applied Sciences. 2023. https://www.humak.fi/en/education/interpreting-aac-instruction-finnish/
Larsson, I. & Thorén-Jönsson, G. 2009. In: Augmentative and Alternative Communication. The Swedish speech interpretation service: An exploratory study of a new communication support provided to people with aphasia https://www-tandfonline-com.ruka.humak.edu:2443/doi/full/10.1080/07434610601180026
