Clinic, community, and in-between: the influence of space on real-time translation of medical expertise by frontline healthcare professionals in marginal tribal communities

In this article, we explore real-time translation work undertaken by frontline healthcare professionals as they interact with marginal tribal communities in Western India. Our 1-year ethnographic study of a healthcare organization delivering obstetric and gynaecological care to tribal communities helps us understand how obstetric counsellors translate allopathic medical expertise across epistemological boundaries to the tribal community they serve, in localized comprehensible forms. We identify four distinct mechanisms of translation work—Interpreting, Annotating, Norming, and Justifying—which differentially deploy and integrate elements of tribal vocabulary, symbols, knowledge, and imaginations of health and body with specific aspects of clinical diagnosis and prescription, making the latter meaningful and actionable in the process. Furthermore, we use configurational approach—Qualitative Comparative Analysis—to investigate how the type of space where the interaction between the counsellors and tribal women patients happens influences the translation work undertaken. We find that counsellors engage in spatially differentiated translation work. They predominantly use justifying and norming in clinical space (hospital); interpreting and annotating in community space (village or school); and interpreting and norming in the overlapping in-between space (outdoor patient department). Our study contributes to translation literature by showing how real-time translation is undertaken in practice, especially in a setting representing high-stakes institutional translation, and how translation work is influenced by the type of space in which interactions happen.