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  Flonja Flavia
Flonja Flavia
  Flonja Flavia

Take Medical Translation Serious - or Face Serious Consequences

The accuracy of medical translation is no kidding - and just a small mistake can have serious consequence or even be fatal - as we shared in the following true story.

There was such a news last year - a Chinese woman in Spain was mistakenly cut off her uterus in a surgery due to language barrier. The story is about Ms. Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, who was found to have a benign tumor in her uterus during an examination in Spain. Perhaps because of her so many years of immigration, Ms. Zhao felt that she had no problem with her language, so she communicated with the doctor all by herself before being admitted to hospital for surgery.

She returned to the hospital for a follow up check-up shortly after, only to be told that her uterus had been removed. So the truth is, the doctor at the Spanish hospital offered her two options, one to remove only the tumor and the other to have a radical hysterectomy. Although Ms. Zhao had no problem coping with daily life in a foreign language, it felt like listening to a book from heaven for her when listening to professional medical terms. She just answered "yes" all the time and signed the consent form.

Ms. Zhao was relatively “lucky” to have “just” lost an organ due to this tiny mistake. It was much to be regretted for the experience of an American young man Willie Lemiere!

Over 30 years ago, Willie was admitted to the emergency room in a coma, whose family spoke Spanish and only simple English. They told the doctor: “He is intoxicado.” There were only three words in this sentence with the first two in English, the last one “intoxicado” in Spanish, meaning that you eat or drink something causing physical discomfort. However, this word is very like “intoxicate” in English, meaning drug overdose. The doctor  treated him as drug overdose according to what he heard, and discovered the true pathogeny was cerebral hemorrhage till two days later. Unfortunately, the best time for treatment had passed, and Willie, who could have been an athlete, ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Anyone who goes to the doctor quite often knows such a situation, the doctor says a lot, yet when confronted with terminologies, the patient can easily get lost. In addition, there are far more patients than doctors in China, and the 5-minute outpatient service time makes it impossible for doctors to explain all the medical terminologies clearly to every patient. Most people can only search on the Internet afterwards. Even professional translators who can handle general English to Chinese translation jobs would still find it difficult to handle medical translations efficiently and accurately.

In fact, medical terminology is not pretentious. Any professional knowledge needs professional terminology, so as to improve the efficiency of communication. However, medicine is a complex subject, and medical knowledge is far away from daily life, so medical terminologies are more difficult to understand than other majors. Open up a medical record at random, from past medical history to physical examination, from surgical report to pathological report, from imaging examination to laboratory examination, we can find it almost involving all the medical foundations such as anatomy, physiology and biochemistry. No wonder medical students have just crossed the threshold of medicine even already graduated after 8 years of study.

Back to today's topic, with the improvement of people's living standard, more and more people realize that, just like travelling and shopping, medical treatment can also be independent of national boundaries. Modern medicine originated in the west, and the most advanced medical technology and ideas are also in the west. This has given rise to a large number of people going abroad for medical treatment. The first obstacle in front of them is language. Just like Ms. Zhao mentioned at the beginning, many people do not take medical translation seriously, which poses great risks to their medical care. Because even a very tiny error in a critical position can have fatal consequences.

The domestic translation market is multifarious and complex. However, highly professional special English translation (English for special purpose) like medical translation is very rare. Apart from targeted majors like Medical English in Peking University Health Science Center, there are few other ways to provide high-quality medical translators. Because medical translation is almost “unidirectional”, in other words, only medical students with solid medical foundation and clinical knowledge can be qualified as a medical translator. I often joke that a medical translator who doesn't want to be a doctor is not a good translator. To be a good medical translator you need to know everything.

Another challenge in medical translation is the breadth of medical knowledge. It may be difficult to be a specialist doctor, but I would say it may be even more difficult to be a medical translator. The difficulty for being a specialist doctor lies in the depth of knowledge, while the difficulty for being a medical translator lies in the breadth of knowledge.

We always say “difference in profession makes one feel worlds apart”. This is true even among different medical disciplines. Although basic medicine is universal, when it's specific to clinical application (the actual process of treatment), each has its own specialization. This is why a hospital sets up different departments such as internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology and pediatrics.

As a medical translator, it is impossible to translate only one kind of diseases. He/She may be exposed to medical records of various diseases from various departments and should: not only know the chemoradiotherapy regimen, but also understand ECG and EEG; not only know pathology and immunohistochemistry, but also be clear about the drug names and regimen; literally know everything.

Having said all this, I am only talking about half of the basics of medical translation, and the other half is English. English ability is also very important for a medical translator. In consideration of limited space, I won't expand on it.

Well, anything apart from Medicine and English? In my opinion, the most important quality of a good medical translator is the “pursuit of perfection”. I often tell my friends that as a medical translator, you should have a heart of an perfectionist, and strive for perfection even for a punctuation mark.

Medical translation is no joke. Any detail, even if only inaccurately expressed, may mislead the doctor's judgment. Doctors overseas can only judge patients’ conditions through their medical records before they took new examinations abroad. All of a patient's experiences and efforts to fight the disease back home have ultimately been gathered in this medical record. The translation of medical materials should not be treated as a job or assignment, but as a work of the medical translators. Attitude is everything. Only with the attitude of "pursuing perfection”, can the translators afford the entrustment of patients and their families.

Patients seeking medical services abroad must pay attention to medical translation, whether it is the text translation of medical records or the interpretation of their communication with doctors in the consulting room. This “terminology-intensive” translation of medicine is different from ordinary literary translation (Ordinary literary translation usually converts 2-3 Chinese characters into one English word, while medical translation converts 1.5 Chinese characters to one English word on average, which shows the intensity of information), therefore the consequence of any mistake can be disastrous. This is why we should always make sure to find a professional and reliable medical translator.


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