The role of an interpreter is highly varied and often incredibly challenging. On any given day interpreters might find themselves working in a court for a murder trial, interpreting for a parent teacher interview, or working in a hospital interpreting for a non-English speaking patient. One of the most challenging situations for interpreters is working in Family Violence settings. This could mean one of our highly skilled interpreters are called to a home or hospital in the middle of the night, where the police are present, and they are asked to interpret for the victim or perpetrator. It can be highly intense, stressful and emotionally draining. To better prepare interpreters for these complex situations, LanguageLoop has partnered with Monash University to create a world first Virtual Reality (VR) training program.
This program is just one of four research projects LanguageLoop has funded through their $150,000 Industry Innovation Fund. The aim of this particular program is to provide VR, authentic scenarios so that interpreters will be better prepared to deal with complex and unexpected situations in different family violence settings. The VR program will present as a series of scenarios, taking the interpreter across the four branches of a family violence setting; health, legal, police and counselling.
Monash University Arts Faculty, (School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics) initiated the project in November 2019 and they have now teamed up with the University’s Law Faculty, Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA) and Virtual and Augmented Reality Services (VARS) to finalise this revolutionary program. The Law Faculty has provided their Moot Court for scene setting, MADA students have been instrumental in visualisation and proof of concept while VARS personnel have partnered with IT students to help build the VR scenarios.
As the University heads into the final stage of this project, LanguageLoop looks forward to seeing this training program break down barriers and enable better access to services across Australian social, health and legal systems for victim-survivors.
For more information on LanguageLoop’s other Innovation projects please click here.
About LanguageLoop’s Research & Innovation Fund
LanguageLoop’s Research & Innovation Fund aims to identify and adopt new practices that benefit the Australian language services industry. The program strives to identify and adopt new training or skills development initiatives and human resource practices that benefit Australia’s language services industry.
