Antoon Cox

KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Faculty Member

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Antoon Cox is a tenure-track professor at KU Leuven, where he coordinates the Master of Interpreting programme and leads the Interpreting Studies Research Group. He teaches courses related to Spanish interpreting, interpreting studies, and multilingual communication. Furthermore, Antoon is a research fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and serves as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on 'Language and Cultural Discordance in Healthcare Communication' at the International Association for Communication in Healthcare. He serves on the Regional Advisory Committee of GLOCAL (The Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics) at SOAS, University of London. As a trainer and examiner of community interpreters, his research focuses on linguistic ethnography and social interaction in linguistically diverse and stressful environments, such as emergency departments and asylum reception centres. His research is published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as The Translator, Patient Education and Counseling, and Advances in Health Sciences Education.

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On equal footing? The impact of patient companions on Lifeworld integration and patient-centeredness in linguistically diverse emergency consultations

International Journal for Equity in Health , 2025

Introduction Patient companions (PCs) can have an ambiguous impact on the quality of communicatio... more Introduction Patient companions (PCs) can have an ambiguous impact on the quality of communication during multilingual medical consultations and therefore on health outcomes. Studies of multilingual medical consultations have focused mainly on PCs' role as interpreters, with less regard to other roles they may take up. This paper uses mixed methods to investigate PC role dynamics in multilingual PC-mediated consultations and how they affect the management of a patient's Lifeworld, a crucial element for history taking and rapport building. Methods Nine recordings of multilingual PC-mediated consultations from a Brussels emergency department, complemented with ethnographic notes and clinician interviews, were subjected to linguistic-ethnographic analysis and a codification of communication patterns and PC roles to explore the link between PC roles and Lifeworld management. PC roles were grouped into four stances (Linguistic agent, Lifeworld agent, System agent, and Principal). The communication patterns were grouped into three categories ("strictly medicine", "Lifeworld heard/included", and "Lifeworld interrupted"). Results In ED consultations, patients' Lifeworld frequently remains inadequately addressed, primarily due to physician interruptions. Significant associations are observed between roles taken up by PCs and the way patients' Lifeworld is managed. Successful integration of Lifeworld aspects is best supported by PCs taking up the role of System agent, possibly because it allows them to link the Lifeworld directly to medical issues. Linguistic-ethnographic analysis reveals how language barriers, PC role changes and Lifeworld management strategies are taking shape organically (often implicitly) determined by a wide range of situational factors, such as the complexity of the topic, the available (non)verbal linguistic repertoire, the level of meta-communication, explicit role negotiation and timing. Conclusion Since poor Lifeworld management negatively impacts care, clinicians should be trained to detect and manage role dynamics and relevant situational factors in PC-mediated multilingual consultations to protect patients' right to high-quality communication and healthcare.

Linguistic competences and intercultural dynamics in Brussels hospitals: the impact of oral and written communication on social inequality in healthcare. An ethnographic research on intercultural communication in five Brussels public hospitals

COMET 2012 Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication, Medicine and Ethics, 2012

Ad hoc interpreting at the Emergency Department

2nd International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, 2014

BABELIRIS: Meertalige en interculturele communicatie in Brusselse ziekenhuizen

Looking for alternatives to mediated communication in Brussels hospitalspresented at Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference onCommunication, Medicine & Ethics (COMET) Trondheim Norway

El uso de la tecnología por los intérpretes y traductores de los servicios públicos: el enlace entre la frecuencia de uso y las formas de formación previa

In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging i... more In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof.En este artículo, presentaremos los resultados preliminares de un estudio a gran escala sobre el uso de instrumentos tecnológicos utilizados para facilitar la comunicación para la provisión de servicios en ...

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Vormingsaanbod en Taalhulpmiddelen als Ondersteuning voor Hulptolken (VTOH)

Linguistically diverse ad hoc mediated ED consultations (1): The dynamics of miscommunication: Contribution to The interpreter’s role in healthcare conversations: A multimodal analysis of a multimodal reality, organized by Van Vaerenbergh Leona [et al.]

15th International Pragmatics Conference: Pragmatics in the real world, 2017

Venturing Into Interdisciplinary Research as an Applied Linguist Challenges and Opportunities

Université de Lausanne, 2020

Interdisciplinary research has risen to the forefront of the attention of universities and fundin... more Interdisciplinary research has risen to the forefront of the attention of universities and funding agencies. The transfer of knowledge and insights between research areas holds great promise – particularly for the study of complex environments, where considering different elements in isolation can yield disappointing results. It also requires the investment of substantial time and resources into setting up deep collaborative relationships, and developing a shared language and common viewpoints starting from different perspectives (1). While the literature on defining interdisciplinarity is abundant, practical guidelines on how to actually implement it remain largely undocumented ‘tacit knowledge’ – especially in the area of applied linguistics. This paper seeks to contribute to this gap, by presenting a few lessons learned from an interdisciplinary study on the impact of language barriers on doctor-patient communication and patient outcomes in the Emergency Department. The paper explains step by step the particularities of engaging mentally, conceptually and practically into interdisciplinary research. It starts by a brief motivation of why I believe applied linguists should engage more frequently in interdisciplinary research, and then discusses the practical challenges, but also the broad opportunities for gaining new insights and fruitful cross-fertilization between different research areas. Some of the opportunities derive from the possibility to harvest low-hanging fruit on untraveled roads. At the same time, entering uncharted territory takes courage and is often met with resistance from others, calling for adequate mental and methodological preparation.

The dynamics of (mis)understandings in linguistically diverse multi-party Emergency Department consultations

AESLA 2016: 34th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics: Professional and Academic Discourse: an Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2016

On the use of technologies in public service interpreting and translation settings

by Antoon Cox and Helene Stengers

TISLID18: Languages for Digital Lives and Cultures, 2018

The Dynamics of (Mis)Communication in Language Discordant Multi-Party Consultations in the Emergency Department

Communicatieproblemen in de dienst spoedgevallen: een kwalitatieve analyse van ad-hoc getolkte spoedgevallenconsultaties

BABELIRIS – Taalkundige competenties en interculturele dynamiek in Brusselse ziekenhuizen: de impact van mondelinge communicatie op sociale ongelijkheid in de gezondheidszorg

2011 ABLA Conference, 2011

Public Service Interpreting in social care

Technology-aided Translanguaging in Emergency Department Consultations

Colloquium Translanguaging in Multilingual Urban Settings, Apr 29, 2016

Technology Use by Public Service Interpreters and Translators: The Link Between Frequency of Use and Forms of Prior Training

FITISPos International Journal, 2019

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Using interdisciplinary research to inform interpreter-mediated consultation training

“When he makes pipi, is it painful?”: English as a lingua franca in the Emergency Department (ED)

Multilingual consultations in urgent medical care

The Translator, 2021

ABSTRACT More than half of the world’s displaced population has moved to urban or peri-urban area... more ABSTRACT More than half of the world’s displaced population has moved to urban or peri-urban areas, and in Brussels, the superdiverse Belgian and European capital, the emergency care sector provides an important setting for analysing the multilingual challenges faced by health practitioners. To gain a better insight in the interactional dynamics of emergency department consultations with immigrant patients, this paper focuses on multilingual strategies that include ‘ad hoc’ communicative solutions used in the absence of professional interpreters (lingua franca use, non-verbal communication, medical translation software, language mediation through companions or hospital staff). Despite their efforts, the participants in our two case-studies lacked the linguistic and interpreting subtleties needed to perform complex linguistic-interactional tasks, and in this way, a form of ‘false fluency’ was created. Ad hoc multilingual solutions, significant as they are, require additional language support to avoid diagnostic insecurity. At the level of patient management, a ‘linguistic assessment’ of patients could potentially be integrated into the triage process, and clinicians should be trained on how to recognise and remediate communication problems under the specific conditions of the emergency department.

Antoon Cox

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