1 Accepted manuscript, published version available at https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/CAM/article/view/18296 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1558/cam.18296 Doctors’ and interpreters’ conversational styles in paediatric diabetes encounters: a case study of empowering language use ANNA W. GUSTAFSSON (i) The Swedish Institute for Health Sciences and Lund University, Sweden (ii) Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden 1. Introduction When a child has diabetes, a parent needs both competence and trust in his or her own ability to perform the care of the child successfully on a daily basis. This competence and trust is seldom there from the start, but built up and gained from experience and training. Health professionals play an important part in this process. The aim of this paper is to discuss communicative strategies used in medical consultations among health care professionals, interpreters and immigrant parents of children with diabetes. During the last decades ideas of empowerment have informed guidelines and practices in western health care. According to these ideas, health care institutions should encourage a feeling of self-efficacy and control, which supports the individual in taking proactive responsibility for his or her health. However, ideas of empowerment in health care have been criticised as western-biased and as deflecting our attention from structural and institutional factors and directing it towards the individual (Anderson 1996: 698). Notions of person-centred care (PCC) and shared decision making (SDM) are often related to those of empowerment – by focusing on the individual, the feeling of self-efficacy