IMH - Unit 8 Working with a Translator

Unit 8Section 1 Exercise 4Working with a Translator

Clinical correlate #2 Working with a translator

Alec Anders - "The Translator"

"A Student's Perspective" (Anonymous)

I’m sure some of us have acted as the translator at some point in our training, and I thought that I would write a little about my experiences. Part of my pre-med volunteering efforts involved giving my phone number to the area hospitals so I could be called for a certain obscure language that was not offered by any translation service. I went months without a call until one fateful day during my summer break. A lady had moved into the area with some very severe medical problems. She would go to the ER a few times a month and I would get called. She and I became friends through our interactions in the hospital and she would always tell me what she thought of her doctors. She almost universally hated them. “They don’t care about me,” “They are too busy for me,” or “They only treat me because they have to,” were some of her common complaints. I had never gotten that impression from most of her doctors, who seemed very interested in her care, and indeed spent more time with her than their English speaking patients. It was only after paying attention to the doctors’ interactions with her that I realized they always spoke directly to me, almost avoiding eye-contact with her. With one exception, all of the docs acted this way. The only doctor that didn’t was a less than terrific doc if you ask me. He wasn’t always kind to her, didn’t seem to care as much, and occasionally would even roll his eyes at her responses. But he always looked directly at her, asked questions directly from her and used me as little as possible. After one especially awkward encounter with him, I apologized to her for his behavior only to be surprised by her response, “Oh him, he’s my favorite.”

Study Questions

1. What techniques are recommended for working with a translator? How does this student anecdote humanize these recommendations?

2. What are the clear advantages to using a translation service (or the next best thing, in the case of the experienced pre-medical student) versus an untrained interpreter such as the janitor in the video? Or conversely, what are some of the limitations of using family members or personnel to help with translation? In the video, what were some of the failings on the doctor’s part? What sorts of concepts might be the most difficult to convey?

3. In the video, there is very little eye contact between the translator and the physician (the opposite of what often happened with the patient in the vignette). What effect do you think this has on the physician? Can they still accurately diagnose a patient?