Who Supports the People Teaching the Profession?
Reflecting on Anna Teitt and Dr Sharon Grigsby-Hill’s session about emotional transference, trauma stewardship and interpreter education
Content note: This article discusses trauma, emotional distress, burnout, discrimination and the effect of difficult professional experiences. Please read it at a time and in a way that feels manageable for you.
An interpreter educator is preparing students for the emotional realities of professional practice.
They explain how interpreters may work with traumatic disclosures, witness discrimination or embody another person’s distress through first-person language. They encourage students to reflect, seek support and recognise when a piece of work has affected them.
After the class, the educator responds to a student who is struggling. They review an upsetting placement experience, deal with a difficult institutional decision and prepare for their own interpreting assignment.
Who is supporting the educator while they support everyone else?
This question was at the centre of Anna Teitt and Dr Sharon Grigsby-Hill’s extended conference presentation, Teaching from an Emptied Cup: The Realities of Interpreter Education.
Research has increasingly recognised that interpreters may experience secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue and burnout. Anna and Sharon argued that one important group remains largely absent from that discussion: the people responsible for preparing interpreters to manage those experiences.
Interpreter educators may be teaching about trauma while carrying their own emotional responses to interpreting, education, institutional inequality and the experiences their students bring into the classroom.
Their session asked what happens when the person expected to fill everyone else’s cup has nothing left to give.
The hidden emotional work of interpreter education
Interpreter education is often described through curriculum, assessment and skill development. Educators teach language, interpreting processes, ethics, professional conduct and reflective practice.
That description does not fully represent the emotional work involved.
Students do not enter a programme as empty containers waiting to receive knowledge. They bring personal histories, identities, previous experiences, anxieties and expectations. Some may have experienced trauma, discrimination or exclusion. Others may begin encountering emotionally difficult material for the first time through their studies or placements.
Educators are expected to teach technical skills while helping students understand how professional work can affect them. They may support someone after a distressing assignment, respond to conflict within a cohort or help a learner separate a difficult performance from their wider sense of professional worth.
Many interpreter educators also continue working as interpreters. They may therefore experience traumatic or morally distressing content directly through their professional practice and then return to the classroom, where they are expected to model calm, thoughtful reflection.
Anna and Sharon described this as a form of dual exposure that existing research does not yet adequately address.
Knowing that the cup exists
The emptied cup metaphor captured a reality that many professionals may recognise.
People continue giving their attention, care and emotional energy until they reach a point where there appears to be nothing left. This may show through exhaustion, tearfulness, panic, reduced empathy or a diminished ability to support students and clients effectively.
Sharon spoke directly about what can happen when this is not addressed. An educator may experience a complete breakdown, leave an institution or leave the profession entirely.
However, the presentation also made a more fundamental point. A person cannot notice that their cup is becoming empty when nobody has helped them recognise that the cup exists.
If emotional transference is not discussed within educator preparation, someone may interpret their reactions as a personal weakness. They may believe that an experienced professional should be able to manage without support or that becoming upset means they are no longer suitable for the work.
The first step is therefore not filling the cup through one activity. It is recognising the emotional labour involved and developing language to describe what may be happening.
Interpreting is embodied emotional work
Anna explained that interpreters do more than transfer words.
They frequently use first-person language and temporarily inhabit another person’s perspective. They reproduce tone, mood and affect so that the target audience receives not only the information but also something of how it was communicated.
When someone is grieving, frightened or distraught, the interpreter may embody that distress. In an interaction involving several people, they may move repeatedly between different emotional positions.
This is part of the skill of interpreting, but it can also create vulnerability.
A professional in another role may hear a traumatic account while remaining visibly separate from the speaker. Interpreters may express that account through their own voice, face and body, using “I”, “me” or “we”.
The experience is not the interpreter’s own, but their body has still been used to represent it.
Interpreter educators then face the additional challenge of teaching students how to do this accurately without pretending that the process has no emotional effect.
Different experiences need different names
Anna and Sharon introduced four concepts that may help interpreters and educators understand their responses.
The terms are connected, but they do not describe exactly the same thing. Distinguishing between them matters because different experiences may require different forms of support.
Secondary traumatic stress
Secondary traumatic stress refers to trauma-related symptoms that arise through exposure to another person’s traumatic experience rather than direct exposure to the event itself.
An interpreter may experience distress after interpreting a detailed account of violence, abuse or loss. An educator may be affected by supporting a student who is processing a traumatic assignment.
The response may be immediate and can include emotional, physical or cognitive symptoms.
Vicarious trauma
Vicarious trauma describes a cumulative change in someone’s inner worldview through continuing empathetic engagement with people who have experienced trauma.
Over time, the person’s beliefs about themselves, other people or the world may begin to change. They may feel less safe, become more mistrustful or find it harder to believe that positive change is possible.
The cumulative nature is important. There may not be one assignment or conversation that clearly explains the change.
Trauma stewardship
Trauma stewardship offers a different way of thinking about continuing to work alongside pain and hardship.
It does not assume that professionals can or should remain untouched. Instead, it asks how people and organisations can engage with traumatic material sustainably, while recognising both pain and joy as parts of life.
The goal is not to absorb another person’s trauma or deny its effect. It is to develop awareness and intentional practices that allow the work to continue without the person becoming consumed by it.
Moral injury
Moral injury occurs when someone perpetrates, fails to prevent, witnesses or learns about something that seriously conflicts with their deeply held moral beliefs.
For interpreters, this might arise when they witness discriminatory or oppressive treatment but feel constrained by their role, the setting or the wishes of the Deaf person involved.
They may behave professionally and follow the agreed decision, but still leave feeling that something important was violated.
Anna suggested that some experiences currently described as burnout, secondary trauma or vicarious trauma may instead involve moral injury. That distinction matters because a wound to someone’s conscience may not be addressed in the same way as exposure to traumatic content.
Neutrality does not remove feelings
The session examined how professional expectations around neutrality can affect interpreters and educators.
An interpreter may understand neutrality as not adding their personal opinion or taking control of the interaction. That does not mean they stop having an internal response.
They may witness a Deaf person being excluded, spoken about disrespectfully or denied appropriate access. The Deaf person may choose not to challenge what has happened and may not want the interpreter to intervene.
Respecting that decision does not automatically remove the interpreter’s anger, sadness or distress.
The interpreter may leave the situation knowing they behaved within their professional role but still feeling injured by what they witnessed and could not change.
Telling professionals to remain neutral without helping them manage the emotional consequences can encourage suppression rather than reflection. It may suggest that the existence of a feeling is itself unprofessional.
Anna’s point was not that interpreters should act on every emotion. It was that emotions continue to exist even when they are not expressed within the interaction. Those feelings need somewhere appropriate to go afterwards.
Is every difficult moment an ethical dilemma?
Anna also considered the way Demand Control Schema is used within interpreter education.
Demand Control Schema provides valuable language for identifying environmental, interpersonal, paralinguistic and intrapersonal demands. It can help interpreters examine the controls available before, during and after an assignment.
However, the presentation questioned whether the framework may sometimes cause interpreters to treat symptoms of emotional distress as though they are separate practical or ethical problems.
Anna offered an example of an interpreter hearing about oppression or exclusion and beginning to feel physically distressed. Their face becomes hot, they begin sweating and find it harder to concentrate.
The immediate question may become whether they should interrupt to remove a jumper, open a window or ask for a fan. This appears to be an environmental demand concerning the temperature of the room.
In reality, the physical response may have begun because of what the interpreter was witnessing or embodying.
Opening the window may address the immediate symptom. It does not address the distress underneath it.
Demand Control Schema was not designed as a complete long-term response to trauma. Anna suggested that relying on it too heavily may also encourage compartmentalisation, with interpreters attempting to place every experience into a separate box.
Compartmentalisation may help someone continue in the moment. Over time, however, emotions that have not been processed can accumulate. A small later event may then appear to cause a disproportionate reaction when it has actually become the final part of a much longer experience.
The lesson is not to stop using Demand Control Schema. It is to recognise where its purpose ends and where other forms of reflection, supervision or specialist support may be needed.
The people missing from the research
Existing research has examined secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma among interpreters working in areas including mental health and healthcare.
Anna acknowledged the value of this work, while pointing to the continued absence of interpreter educators.
We do not yet have enough evidence about how many educators continue interpreting alongside teaching, how the two roles interact or what support structures help them remain in the field.
This creates a serious gap.
Educators are being asked to teach students about emotional transference without necessarily having been prepared to recognise or manage it themselves. They may be expected to discuss vicarious trauma, professional boundaries and resilience while their own institutional environment is contributing to distress.
When educator wellbeing remains unexamined, curriculum decisions may also be affected. A teacher who has had to survive by suppressing emotion may unintentionally present that strategy as normal professional behaviour.
A person who has learned not to seek help may struggle to create a learning environment in which students feel able to ask for it.
What spills into the classroom?
Students learn from more than the formal curriculum.
They observe how educators respond to uncertainty, stress and mistakes. They notice whether teachers appear emotionally available and whether difficult experiences can be discussed honestly.
An educator experiencing secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma or moral injury may unintentionally pass patterns of distress into the classroom through their feedback, behaviour and relationships.
They may become closed off, impatient or unable to offer the level of support they previously provided. Students may interpret this as evidence that they should manage alone.
A learner may stop asking questions because their educator appears unavailable. That habit can continue after qualification, when the interpreter may avoid supervision or peer support even during difficult periods.
Anna connected this with horizontal violence and early attrition. New professionals can enter an already demanding field with limited emotional reserves and an established belief that asking for help shows weakness.
The emotional wellbeing of educators therefore affects far more than one person. It influences how students are prepared, how feedback is given and what professional culture graduates carry into the field.
Turning the research question towards the self
Sharon’s contribution used critical autoethnography to examine her own experience as an interpreter educator.
Autoethnography places the researcher’s own experience within the research. Critical autoethnography also examines the systems, inequality and power surrounding those experiences.
Sharon asked herself:
What vicarious trauma have I experienced as an interpreter educator?
She realised that she had never asked herself that question. She had recounted difficult experiences, but had not previously identified them through this particular lens.
Her reflection drew on three professional vignettes.
The first involved a university event that was described as accessible. Deaf faculty attended expecting appropriate language provision, but the interpreters supplied were not suitably qualified. The institutional promise of inclusion was present, but the access itself caused harm.
The second involved a trilingual student who was fluent in ASL, English and spoken Spanish but repeatedly struggled with the written English section of a standardised interpreter certification test. Sharon experienced guilt and complicity as an educator who had helped prepare a skilled student for a profession while watching an assessment system continue to block their progress.
The third concerned a student intern who felt linguistically and emotionally unprepared for the traumatic content encountered during an assignment and then experienced difficulties within the mentoring relationship.
Through these experiences, Sharon identified themes of performative inclusion, guilt and complicity, lateral violence, cycles of harm and the hidden tax placed on minoritised educators.
When inclusion is only performative
The first vignette showed the difference between saying that access has been arranged and ensuring that meaningful access is present.
The university could point to interpreters having been booked. On paper, it had met an accessibility requirement.
However, the interpreters were not appropriately qualified, and the systems used to select them had failed. Deaf faculty were placed in a setting that presented itself as inclusive while providing access that was inadequate and harmful.
For an interpreter educator working within that institution, the experience carried several layers.
Sharon was not only witnessing the exclusion of Deaf colleagues. She was part of a university system that taught interpreting and publicly claimed to value access.
This contradiction contributed to the emotional impact.
Performative inclusion can be particularly distressing because the organisation’s public language makes it harder to name the reality. The correct policies, statements and appointments may all exist, while the people affected continue to experience exclusion.
When an educator feels complicit
The second vignette raised questions about standardised assessment.
Sharon’s student was trilingual and had demonstrated the skills needed to succeed within the field, but repeatedly encountered a written English test as a barrier to certification.
As an educator who had also contributed to certification test development, Sharon felt caught between supporting the student and recognising her own connection to the system.
The emotional response was not created solely by the student’s disappointment. It involved the educator’s awareness of power, professional systems and her own previous participation within them.
This is part of what critical autoethnography can make visible. The researcher is not positioned outside the system as a neutral observer. They consider how their own role, authority and decisions connect with the harm being examined.
Feelings of guilt or complicity do not automatically mean that an individual caused the whole problem. They may signal that a system needs closer examination and that the person’s relationship with it has become morally distressing.
Lateral violence and cycles of harm
The third vignette involved an intern who felt unprepared for the linguistic and emotional demands of a traumatic assignment and then struggled within their mentoring relationship.
Mentorship should create a bridge between training and professional practice. It can become harmful when the mentor repeats harsh treatment they experienced earlier in their own career.
A professional may believe they are preparing someone for reality by telling them to toughen up, suppress their response or stop expecting support. In doing so, they may pass on the same coping mechanisms that left them unsupported.
The result is a cycle of harm.
The educator witnesses the student’s distress and may feel responsible for not having prepared them sufficiently. At the same time, the wider profession may offer few safe routes for intervention or support.
This connects the wellbeing of educators, mentors and students. None of these groups develops separately from the others.
The hidden tax on minoritised educators
Sharon also identified a hidden tax attached to being a minoritised educator.
A person may be expected to provide additional cultural knowledge, challenge inequality, support minoritised students and represent inclusion within the institution. Much of that work may remain unrecognised and unprotected.
They may also need to decide how much of their authentic self can safely be brought into an academic or professional environment.
This is more than general workload. It is the repeated emotional and intellectual labour of recognising inequity, explaining it to others and managing the consequences of speaking about it.
An institution may publicly value diversity while relying on minoritised staff to carry much of the work needed to make that statement meaningful.
Sharon described the process of naming this hidden tax as having some healing value. Recognition did not remove the structural problem, but it allowed her to understand that the distress was not simply an individual failure to cope.
Reflexivity as recognition and management
Sharon found critical autoethnography difficult and multilayered. She had to consider her own perspective, the experiences of other people involved, confidentiality and the power operating within each situation.
She also found that the process helped her recognise what she had been carrying.
Her conclusion was not that her cup was empty. It was overflowing with emotions and thoughts that had not previously been named or examined.
Reflexivity can therefore act as both a way of identifying what is happening and a method of beginning to manage it. Regular reflection may help educators and interpreters notice physical reactions, emotional patterns and changes in their thinking before these become overwhelming.
However, self-reflection should not become another task placed entirely on the individual.
An educator cannot journal their way out of an inaccessible institution, an unfair assessment system or a harmful professional culture. Reflexivity can help identify the issue, but organisations must also respond to what is found.
Support needs to be structural as well as personal
Anna and Sharon discussed resilience practices including social support, patience, meaningful activity, healthy routines, self-reflection and a sense of personal control.
These can help people recognise warning signs and maintain a more sustainable relationship with difficult work.
Warning signs may include chronic exhaustion, helplessness, hypervigilance, diminished creativity, avoidance, numbness, cynicism or difficulty tolerating complexity.
Noticing one sign does not automatically mean someone is experiencing vicarious trauma or moral injury. Patterns and changes over time may indicate that further reflection or support is needed.
Individual strategies remain only one part of the response.
Interpreter education programmes and institutions need structures that protect educator wellbeing. These might include manageable workloads, professional supervision, access to appropriate counselling, peer support, realistic expectations and clear routes for addressing discrimination or institutional harm.
Educators also need preparation for the emotional work of teaching, not only knowledge of the subject they will deliver.
Trauma stewardship becomes an organisational responsibility as well as a personal practice.
What does this mean for interpreters and translators?
Although the session focused on interpreter education, its central questions apply more widely.
Interpreters may work with difficult information in healthcare, safeguarding, employment, education, social care and many other settings. Trauma exposure is not limited to work officially labelled as mental health or crisis interpreting.
Translators can also spend prolonged periods working with material concerning violence, abuse, discrimination, illness or loss. A recorded translation may require repeated review of the same content, with the translator embodying the message over several takes.
Educators teaching translation face similar responsibilities when selecting material, reviewing students’ work and discussing the emotional content involved.
Professionals may also experience moral injury when a commissioner asks for wording or presentation that conflicts with their understanding of respectful, accurate access.
The important question is not whether someone should avoid every difficult subject. It is whether they understand the possible effect, have appropriate choices and know where support is available.
What are we passing on?
The theme for The Together Conference 2026 was Pick It Up, Pass It On.
Educators pass on much more than interpreting techniques.
They pass on ways of responding to uncertainty, distress and professional conflict. They show students whether it is acceptable to admit that work has affected them and whether seeking support is part of professional responsibility.
They may also pass on unhealthy messages without intending to.
Students can learn that experienced interpreters remain unaffected, that feelings should be placed into boxes and that asking for help shows a lack of resilience.
Anna and Sharon’s session asked us to pass on something different: language for recognising secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, trauma stewardship and moral injury.
We can teach developing professionals that emotional responses do not automatically mean they are weak or unsuitable. We can also make clear that recognising those responses does not remove their responsibility to practise safely, seek support and work within their competence.
Most importantly, we need to stop expecting educators to teach sustainable practice while working within systems that make their own practice unsustainable.
New insights require honest examination
The theme for The Together Conference 2027 is New Insights, Shared Purpose.
Anna and Sharon’s emerging research shows how new insight can begin by examining an experience that has previously remained unnamed.
Perhaps you are researching interpreter or translator educators, emotional labour, moral injury, trauma stewardship or professional attrition.
You may have developed supervision or peer-support arrangements for educators. You might have reviewed how traumatic content is introduced within training, or examined whether institutional systems place hidden demands on minoritised staff.
You may also have used autoethnography or another reflective research method to understand an experience from within.
These contributions could support the programme for The Together Conference 2027.
The Call for Papers opens on Monday 5 October 2026. You do not need to decide whether your proposal belongs in the live or extended programme. Submit your idea and the review panel will consider where accepted contributions fit best.
Poster submissions will also be welcomed for emerging research, educator-support projects, reflective work, early findings and developing resources.
The work of preparing future professionals is too important to depend on educators continually pouring from an emptied cup.
A shared purpose must include supporting the people asked to teach it.
Using this article for unstructured CPD
Please approach these questions with care. You do not need to record personal information or reflect on experiences that feel unsafe to revisit.
What emotional work is involved in interpreting, translating, teaching or mentoring that may not appear in the formal role description?
How would you recognise that your own “cup” was beginning to run low?
Which physical, emotional or cognitive changes might act as warning signs for you?
What is your current understanding of secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma?
How does moral injury differ from exposure to another person’s trauma?
Have you experienced a situation where professional constraints conflicted with your moral values?
Does the expectation of neutrality sometimes make it harder to acknowledge an emotional response?
When might Demand Control Schema help manage a situation, and when might another form of support be needed?
Have you ever mistaken a physical or environmental difficulty for a deeper response to the content of the work?
What messages about emotion, resilience and asking for help were passed on during your own training?
How might an educator’s wellbeing affect students through feedback, behaviour or the classroom environment?
What additional emotional labour may be carried by Deaf, disabled or minoritised educators?
How could reflexive writing, supervision or peer support help identify patterns in your work?
Which parts of the problem require organisational action rather than personal self-care?
What support should interpreter and translator education programmes provide for their staff?
Is there an experience, resource or area of research that could become a proposal or poster for The Together Conference 2027?
A short professional reflection on these questions could be recorded as part of your unstructured CPD.
Comments