Navigating towards a multicultural healthcare landscape: bridging linguistic and cultural divides in transcultural care for European Sinophone communities

The presence of a broad spectrum of ethnic minorities within contemporary European society engenders a nuanced multicultural milieu, wherein individual interactions are profoundly shaped by disparate cultural and linguistic frameworks (Micheluzzi & Burrai, 2021). This perspective assumes paramount significance in the provision of transcultural care directed towards the substantial Sinophone population, whose access to medical services is impeded by linguistic and cultural hurdles (Zuccheri, 2016). Specifically, a primary impediment to healthcare utilization lies in the limited proficiency in medical terminology, constituting a highly specialized linguistic domain (Scarpa, 2020) deviating from standard linguistic norms due to its precise morphosyntactic, lexical, and textual attributes (Berruto, 1974). Aligned with the ethos of the right to health espoused by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the National Health System mandates equitable access to healthcare services for all individuals regardless of cultural background. This necessitates leveraging linguistic and cultural mediators to navigate the intricate interplay between therapeutic efficacy, the quality of patient-provider relationships, and sensitivity towards the patient's individual (Li, 2005) and cultural (Benucci & Grosso, 2021) nuances. This aligns with the emerging field of medical linguistics, which explores linguistic features, terminology, and communication strategies in medical contexts to enhance patient care and communication effectiveness. Through an interdisciplinary approach and a careful examination of social, ethical, communicative, and relational dynamics inherent in the specialist-patient relationship, the research project aims to establish theoretical and methodological foundations for training programs aimed at professionalizing linguistic and cultural mediators in the healthcare field. The use of corpus-based terminology (Brookes et al., 2022), integrated with a socio-anthropological investigation directed at the Sinophone community and healthcare professionals, aims to identify relational needs and equip mediators with necessary linguistic and cultural skills to overcome socio-communicative barriers hindering Sinophone communities’ access to healthcare services.