Healthcare interpreting, performed via tele/video-conference or face-to-face interactions
is complex. Research in healthcare interpreting has contributed to our understanding
of this practice (Metzger 1999; Davidson 2001; Angelelli 2004, 2011, 2012; Baraldi/Gavioli
2012; Meyer 2012). Access to cross-cultural/linguistic interactions between provider/
patient mediated by interpreters is essential to study intercultural/linguistic healthcare
communication. Access to naturalistic data, however, is not always feasible. Therefore, researchers
rely more and more on secondary data for analysis. This paper discusses ethical,
practical and scientific dilemmas experienced when assessing the feasibility of turning
ethnographic data into data for corpus studies. Firstly, after an introduction and a concise
review of the principles underlying ethnography, the original studies are explained briefly
to contextualize the data. These studies are: a) an ethnography (Spanish-English) of a
medical interpreting unit and b) two case studies (Cantonese/Hmong-English) conducted
in a total of three public hospitals in the United States. Secondly, a discussion on using
data for a different purpose than the original one, and the resulting ethical, practical and
scientific dilemmas will be presented. The goal is to reflect on and examine if the opportunities
to advance science may outweigh the issues raised in this paper and if it would be
ethical to proceed
