The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze how social workers within social services experience and handle the communication as well as problems in interpreted meetings. Furthermore to examine the need for education for interpreter users. The aim was to get an increased understanding of interpreted meetings from social workers perspective and thereby inspire to improve the work to the benefit the client.

The study was conducted in one municipality with six social workers, using qualitative semi-structured interviews. This method was chosen with the purpose to enable follow-up questions and in-depth answers. The analysis was based on the mathematical theory of communication and the theory about street-level bureaucracy. The results of this study showed that using only verbal communication becomes an uncertain element in the meeting. Our conclusion is that noise occurs in different ways in the interpreted conversation. Since the communication forms the basis for the personal treatment, the clients can consequently receive inferior treatment and support. Moreover, we found that problems in interpreted meetings are being handled differently by the social workers. One possible way is to place counterclaims towards the interpreter and take control over the meeting.

Furthermore we found that social workers has a need for education in interpreted meetings but not in a extensive way. Our conclusion is that the lack of education and guidelines in interpreted meetings becomes an important part of social workers discretion and that there can be both positive and negative effects.