Lost in translation

• Dr. Andrea Hunter, , Nikki Bozinoff and Katie Dorman

Immigrants, refugees can’t get adequate health care if they can’t be understood

Phuong Nguyen, a 36-year-old woman who spoke little English, died on April 21, 1995, after a 23-day saga at a B.C. hospital. Coroner Jack Harding found that Nguyen’s care had been complicated by significant language barriers and inadequate translation.

Nguyen had been unable to communicate her previous diagnosis of lupus to her health care provider. It was only once she was pregnant and suffered complications that her prior diagnosis became apparent. Nguyen’s health care providers explained the serious health sequelae (negative after-effect) of lupus and pregnancy to Nguyen, without the use of a translator. Less than a month later, her child died in utero and she succumbed to complications shortly after.

Similarly, on Aug. 20, 1986, 55-year-old Harbhajan Singh Chattu lost his leg and experienced kidney failure due to vascular complications that had been misdiagnosed as back pain. The misdiagnosis occurred because Chattu did not have adequate English language skills to describe his symptoms.

A B.C. Supreme Court Justice found Chattu’s physician negligent in his examination and diagnosis and awarded Chattu a $1.3 million settlement.

Sadly, decades after these incidents, medical translation services remain inadequate across the country, leaving thousands of people with health concerns literally lost in translation.

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Medical translation as a service

Article by Charles Edert

Medical translation is a type of medical technology, which offers an opportunity in a quantum expanding publishing field. This medical technology requires a lot of skilled and efficient manpower in order to carry out the work as fast and with good quality. A lot of knowledge is required in medical technology, and it is costly. This type of translation gives information about the process of translation of files related to the medical field from one language to another. This process that is carried out is not an easy process; therefore, a lot of professions are needed to carry out the work. Good skills and in depth knowledge of certain medical terminologies is also very important in carrying out this service.

The professions which carry out this process of translation are referred to as medical translators who besides having vast and wide knowledge of the subject area are also very comfortable and confident in putting to use various audio and publishing software designed for carrying out medical translation. The medical/paramedical files need to be translated to common or the specific target language.

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Deal brings new EU patents system closer

All but two of the EU's 27 member states have agreed to set up a common European patent system that could mean big savings for hundreds of firms.Continue reading the main story

Currently European patents can cost ten times more than patents registered in the US because of translation costs.

A fast-track procedure is being used to make the common patent a reality, but there is still a big legal obstacle.

Italy and Spain fear discrimination because patents would be filed only in English, French or German.

The two countries have lodged a legal challenge with the EU's top court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), arguing that the new enhanced co-operation procedure should not be used to bring in the patent system.

The procedure, which came in with the Lisbon Treaty, allows a group of countries to go ahead with EU legislation even when not all 27 member states agree.

It has not been used before for EU single market issues, and Italy and Spain consider its use to be illegal in an area as sensitive as patents.

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The Success of Native Language and Culture-Based Education

By ICTMN Staff 

This video is from an oversight hearing held by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs May 26, 2011 on Expanding the Success of Native Language and Culture-Based Education. It was posted by the National Indian Education Association.

Watch the video here

Pharaohs, Cantonese and the Gang of Four

BY PATRICK COX

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Was Mubarak Egypt’s last pharaoh? Maybe only if Putin is Russia’s last tsar. Names for strong men may say as much about public expectations as they do about a leader’s style.

There is a comfort to thinking of the year of your country as the father or mother of the nation. And it’s not just countries with dictators that name their leaders in this way. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady (soon to be a biopic of the same name starring Meryl Streep). Finland’s President Tarja Halonen is oftenreferred to as Moominmamma– partly ironically, but also out of pride. (The Moomins are a cartoon strip and set of children’s fantasy stories that are as big as Disney in Finland).

In Mubarak’s case, the pharaoh moniker is an insult. It’s shorthand for absolutism, state violence and destruction.

“If we go back four thousand years pharaohs were kings that ruled for life and built grand monuments to themselves,” says Joshua Stacher of Kent State University. “It’s not a good term.”

It wasn’t always that way. A few decades ago, the pharaohs were remembered proudly as demi-gods who “ensured the provision of water to the Egyptian peasants in the Nile Delta and upper Egypt,” says Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink. That is “an extremely positive role in the deep Egyptian psyche.” Maybe that sense of the pharaohs will return, now that Mubarak is gone.

Check out this post on Language Log for Chinese signs held by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Were these people protesting Mubarak, or sending a message to China’s Communist rulers?

Also in the podcast, fears for the future of Cantonese, once the lingua franca of many Chinatowns around the world.

Beijing is stepping up its efforts to establish Mandarin as the official tongue of China.

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CHINESE VOICEOVER ARTIST NEEDED

We are looking for NATIVE Mandarin Chinese voiceover artists to narrate a large volume of general medical terminology. You will NOT be considered unless you are a 100% native Mandarin speaker.

Job starts immediately. You will only be considered if you have the ability to record MP3 files at high quality on your own.

Please submit voice demos to info [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com

Only those who register with us will be considered for work. 
You can register here: http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

Language-learning in Europe, and free speech in Tunisia

BY PATRICK COX

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In France, the government is proposing that children start learning English at age three. It’s high time, they argue, that French educators face up to the fact that learning English gives you — and your country — an edge.

Good idea, say French intellectuals. But why English? According to French linguist, Claude Hagège, the proposal is “totally pointless, if not ridiculous.”

Now, before you write off Hagège as a good-for-nothing naysayer, consider this: he’s one of France best-known promoters of language-learning. He strongly supports the idea of people learning several languages if they can. But for Hagège, language is power– and speaking English is “not quite innocent.” From his perspective (and, I suspect, he is far from alone) it’s more important to resist the rise of English than it is to expose French youth to it, at least as a first foreign language. In his words, speaking English is “a guilty act because it is the language of very wealthy, industrialized countries. And I think any person who has a minimum of sense of justice cannot accept that because this means domination by the countries whose mother tongue this language is.”

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Consciousness, Poetry, and Bilingual Babies

BY PATRICK COX 

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We take a trip inside the mind in this week’s pod.

How much is human consciousness shaped by language? Somewhat, says theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. He’s more interested in the other things that shape it, like what he calls the “lake of sensation” — colors, lights and sounds. I guess you could argue that those sensations themselves comprise the elements of a language of consciousness.

Humphrey views this kind of raw feeling as predating language in infants. Maybe, but recent research on the bilingual brain suggests that we may begin our language development as early as in the womb. I talk with the host of the Big Show’s Science podcast Rhitu Chatterjee about this.

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At the BBC, fewer languages and less influence?

BY PATRICK COX

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Like millions of others, I grew up with the BBC. Today I work for a BBC co-production. I’m not a BBC employee, but I’m close to this story. And, um, that’s not me in the picture. I use a smaller microphone.

The cuts: five BBC language services will close (Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean). Seven more language services, including Mandarin Chinese andHindi, will be cut back from radio to internet only. A further six services will stop transmitting on short wave.

It means an estimated 30 million fewer BBC listeners worldwide. Will people migrate to the web and to English language news, or will the BBC – and its news values – become less influential?

There was a huge amount of coverage of this story. Most people were critical of the cuts with the British government — rather than the BBC — receiving the blame (here and here for example). But in Britain there is a BBC-despising minority which offered its own spin.

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Dictators with dialects, finger spelling and universal Inuit

BY PATRICK COX

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Dialects are beautiful, ugly, inevitable, unhelpful, and of course, languages without armies. Dialects are widespread– they exist in most languages. Millions, perhaps billions of people speak them. Some, like many Chinese, speak a regional dialect at home, and a standard form of the language in public settings. And then there all those dictators who grew up speaking dialects. As a boy, Napoleon spoke Italian and Corsu— the home language/Italian dialect of the island of Corsica. The future Emperor of the French didn’t learn French until later. Hitler spoke an Austrian-inflected German. For his part, Gaddafi speaks a version of Arabic that isn’t widely understood, even within Libya. He comes from a Bedouin minority, which is reflected in his language. This may amplify his otherworldlyness. More on all of that here. Many languages began life as a series of dialects, which over time– and with the encouragement of a nation state– morphed in something with standardized vocabulary and grammar (Robert Lane Greene writes about this in his new book, You Are What You Speak).

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From Cicero to Lynne Truss with Robert Lane Greene

BY PATRICK COX 

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As soon as I saw the new book by Robert Lane Greene You Are What You Speak, I know he and needed to speak. Not just because we both speak Danish (we didn’t even talk about that). It’s mainly because the book takes on so many of the same issues that I do in The World in Words podcast. It’s like the pod on steroids, done with proper research.

Underlying You Are What You Speak is a love of the relative chaos of language. We can’t predict, let alone control how language evolves, Greene argues, so why try? Well, it seems we can’t help ourselves.

Sometimes it’s governments that issue linguistic admonishments: France and Turkey have been especially active. Sometimes it’s individual armchair stylists: Cicero (“At some point…I relinquished to the people the custom of speaking, I reserved the knowledge [of correct grammar and pronunciation] to myself”); Strunk and White (“Do not join independent choices by a comma”); and Lynn Truss (“Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”). Of that lot, Turkey’s switch from Arabic to Roman script appears to have been the most successful. In France, theAcadémie française is admired but largely ignored. And most of the armchair stylists lose out to common usage. The more free, open and democratic a society is, the less it is likely to follow anyone else’s language rules.

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English-only in the US, translating tweets in Japan and satire in Egypt

BY PATRICK COX 

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The English Only movement in the United States is always active during times of high immigration (check out my previous interview with US English lobbyist Tim Schultz). Now, the movement has got a shot in the arm from the Tea Party. It may help convince lawmakers and voters in the 19 remaining states that don’t yet have a law on their books declaring English to be the official language.

The issue with most of these laws is that they are ineffective (here is a map of English Only legislation in the United States). Many are symbolic only: they don’t specify how and when English must be used. Some do get specific. In Arizona and Oklahoma, for example, you can’t take a driving test in a foreign language. But even then it’s not clear how much English Only laws affect linguistic behaviour.

There’s a long-established pattern of English acquisition among immigrants and their children. The first generation often speaks little or no English. The second generation, born in the United States, is bilingual, but often more proficent at English than the home language. The third generation is usually monolingual English, unable to communicate with their immigrant grandparent. People like language writer Robert Lane Greene, interviewed in my story, believe that pattern is again playing itself out.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Tea Partiers from bumper-sticking their love of English and fear of (mainly) Spanish from Florida and Texas all the way to Wasilla, AK. This video has more than 14 million hits on YouTube, and the duo have performed it numerous times at Tea Party events.

Also in the pod this week, a conversation with Aya Watanabe, who has spent much of the past month translating earthquake-related tweets from Japanese to English.

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Linguistic surrealism from China to Belgium

BY PATRICK COX 

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Arrested Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrote a blog that was, if anything, even more provocative than his art. We hear from Beijing-based translator and art critic Lee Ambrozy who has translated Ai’s blog posts into English. 

Next in the pod, fellow Big Show podcaster Clark Boyd on the trials, tribulations and silliness of living in Belgium, where most people define themselves not by nationality but by mother tongue. Clark lives in Brussels, which is officially bilingual. Most of the rest of Belgium is determinedly monolingual — Dutch in the north, French in the south.

I put it to Clark that Belgium is a bit like the former Yugoslavia, but without the guns. I was feeling pretty good about that thought until he told me I was by no means the first person to articulate it. He also said Belgians have it way too good to take up arms over their linguistic differences — despite the fact that they cannot form a government, and they may even one day opt to slice the country in two.

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