Professional Boundaries & Relationships with the Community

We have been having discussions with both juniors and seniors about relationships with the communities we serve.

I thought I would pose some questions to the larger community (interpreters and consumers) about how you navigate relationships in the community.

There seem to be conflicting messages as students learn about the Deaf community and culture. On the one hand, they learn about the idea of needing to be "of" the community - involved and actively participating.

And yet on the other hand there is the Code of Professional Conduct that encourages interpreters to remain neutral and impartial.

Then stories from interpreters about the complications of interpreting for private, sensitive type of interactions and then seeing those same people at community events being and feeling awkward.

So, how do you navigate relationships between consumer and interpreter? From consumer perspective? From practitioner perspective? What advice would you have for new interpreters trying to figure out where to place their boundaries as professionals?

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