Overcoming language barriers: developing a trilingual terminology resource on childhood disorders for Italian, English and Russian

The provision of language services in Italy is a complex situation, characterised by two main issues: the widespread presence of child language brokering and the growing invisibility of linguistic and cultural mediators. These two phenomena are intertwined, since the lack of proper recognition and regulation of the profession of the cultural mediator paves the way for the spread of non-professional interpreting and translation practices, such as child language brokering, in which migrant children and adolescents are asked to mediate for their families. The social and educational fields are the most affected by this issue: the funds received are not enough to rely on professional language services and the situation worsens when teachers and social workers need to talk with parents about childhood disorders pupils may suffer from. These are contexts in which rather complex terminology is used and thus, in cases where mediation between two languages is required, communication may become impossible if the necessary resources are not available. Therefore, this project aims at developing a trilingual terminology resource on childhood disorders for Italian, English and Russian with the purpose of providing teachers, language experts and social workers with a tool facilitating the communication of specialised information to the families of non-Italian children.