“Helen Dominic Is Examining the Power that Listening Can Have on Healing,” Georgetown College Talks about the Research of our 2022-23 Fellow

Georgetown College writes about Helen Dominic, Linguistics PhD student and recipient of one of our 2022-2023 Research Fellowships recipients, who “researches improvements in [the] ways we handle immigrant care.” The article tells Helen Dominic’s story, and how her interest in linguistics was shaped by her experience as an immigrant. “The more I learned, the more I realized that there is so much work that needs to be done within immigrant discourse and medical care,” Dominic explains. “Currently, I’m on the pathway to writing my dissertation that will focus on interpretation  in medical settings, specifically the immigrant interpreter’s experiences.”

Helen Dominic’s research looks at interactions between doctors, immigrant patients, and family companions. She investigates non-professional interpretation for family members from a sociolinguistic lens by conducting interviews with patients with limited proficiency in English, family companions who interpret for them, and doctors, and studies their narratives about non-professional interpretation.