If you didn’t know, I am an interpreter. An English to Vietnamese consecutive medical interpreter to be exact. And I just want to share some of my thoughts, about the job, about the things that I had the pleasure (and displeasure) to have encountered.

Let’s say you are a person in a foreign country. Your day was being so fine, until you trips and fall, scraping your knee in the process. You go to the hospital to get it treated. But, uh oh, what’s this? You don’t know the local language? Tough luck, buddy, you just have a bad knee now, and for the rest of the trip, good luck walking straight.

That is what you’d have to endure if there are no interpreters.

But luckily, most hospitals in the US and EU are required to have an interpreter, either on-site or over-the-phone. They help translate what you said to the doctor, and vice versa. Oh doc, knee hort. Okay, hort how? Hort here, bleeding. Okay, me disinfect and band-aid. Thanks doc, me enjoy rest of trip. Okay, yo bill comes up to 1240713509812650 USD. See? Everyone is now happy, the patient, the doctor, and the billion-dollar healthcare industry, all thanks to the nifty interpreter! Sounds like a simple job, right?

Haha, no.

Fulfilling? Yes, sometimes. Helpful? Absolutely, I genuinely have so much respect for (most of) my colleagues. But never simple. Let me tell you why.

Out of all the complexities of this job, this one takes the cake. Linguistic difference is the fact that different languages functions differently, and some phrases just don’t translate well. For example:

Seems straightforward enough right? No. If I translate this directly to Vietnamese, it will 10 times out of 10 confuse the listener.

Even as I’m writing this, I had to double, or triple take on that sentence to process how to answer that question. It’s just not how Vietnamese people use that phrase. A better translation of that sentence would be:

If we translate that back to English, that would be:

There is some linguistic dissecting here. We break up the “how often” phrase to its meaning of frequency “how long until once”. And this type of dissecting happens all the time, breaking a big ‘ol word to smaller chunks to help the listener understand the meaning better. This kind of manufactured clarity is crucial, because we are not dealing with academic translation here. In my experience, the target audience of medical interpreters are usually older people, or people with less academic opportunity, usually in some kind of distress. They don’t need a word by word translation, they don’t need the pompous jargon, they need to know what the doctor is trying to say to them. However, there is a fine line between clarifying terms to support understanding and misrepresenting what was said. If in the previous example, I asked:

or in English:

That would be falsifying. Even though in this specific scenario, the outcome of the interaction would probably be the same, it is a terrible habit to fall into that would lead to misinterpretation.

You can never know all of medical terms. That is just a fact of life. Sun shines, fish swims and you don’t know what sphygmomanometer is.