The Oregon Health Authority and Intercultural Solutions consulting developed a guide to aid home visitors and supervisors in culturally and linguistically responsive practice, offering reflective tools, inquiry questions, and supervisor guidance to better understand and support families within their cultural contexts.
Resource Tag: Language Services
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Working with Interpreters in Home Visiting Training Recording
On March 9th, 2026, the Refugee Systems of Care team invited Mary Jayne McCullough to present on the topic of working effectively with interpreters in home visiting. Her training addressed the role and responsibilities of interpreters during home visits, the strengths and limitations of different interpretation modalities, best practices for working with interpreters in home visiting, and opportunities for quality improvement. The recording for this training can be viewed below.
Resource: Working with Interpreters in Home Visiting Training Recording
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Working with Interpreters in Home Visiting Training Slides
On March 9th, 2026, the Refugee Systems of Care team invited Mary Jayne McCullough, CEO of Global Wordsmiths, to present on the topic of working effectively with interpreters in home visiting. Her training addressed the role and responsibilities of interpreters during home visits, the strengths and limitations of different interpretation modalities, best practices for working with interpreters in home visiting, and opportunities for quality improvement. The slide deck for this training can be downloaded below.
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Communication Guide for Home Visits with Interpreters
The Refugee Systems of Care project developed this script to provide ready-to-use language for home visitors to make introduction, explain the purpose of the visit, support accurate language interpretation, build rapport with interpreters, and debrief after visits to improve communication.
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Overcoming Common Challenges: Working with Interpreters in Home Visiting
The Refugee Systems of Care project created this handout to outline common challenges in working with interpreters during home visits. This handout offers practical tips to promote clear communication, interpreter neutrality, and client inclusion before, during, and after visits with newcomer families.
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Introduction to Working with Interpreters in Home Visiting
The Refugee Systems of Care project created this handout to explain how trained interpreters support clear, accurate, and unbiased communication during home visits. This handout addresses the role of an interpreter, ethical considerations, and advantages of using a trained interpreter vs untrained helpers or machine translation tools.
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Switchboard Cultural Backgrounder: Afghanistan
Switchboard adapted a cultural backgrounder on Afghanistan, originally produced by Cultural Orientation Resource Exchange, to support refugee service workers in providing cultural responsive care to Afghan families who have resettled in the U.S. This Afghanistan cultural backgrounder includes information on the historical context, languages, holidays, traditions, and family dynamics, among other topics.
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Welcoming America: Language Access Fundamentals
In this two-part series, Welcoming America explains the meaning of language access and gives you the fundamental tools to distinguish language access tools and work effectively with language access tools to support limited English proficiency families in your program.
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Switchboard Course: Working with Interpreters (part 1)
In this free learning course, Switchboard teaches the fundamentals of working with an interpreter, including key terms, the role of an interpreter, and why it’s important to use an interpreter when working with families who have limited English proficiency. This course is intended for providers who are new to working with interpreters. The estimated time to complete this course is 30 minutes.
Resource: Working with Interpreters (part 1)
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Switchboard Course: Overcoming Challenges in Interpretation (part 2)
In this free learning course, Switchboard teaches providers strategies for overcoming common challenges when working with an interpreter, including preparing for an interpreted conversation, supporting interpreters during a conversation, and improving the quality of interactions. This course is intended for providers who have experience working with interpreters and families with limited English proficiency. Switchboard recommends completing part 1 “Working with Interpreters” before completing this training. The estimated time to complete this course is 20 minutes.