Introduction to Medical Interpreting

• A provider gives a non-English-speaking patient a prescription, explaining that it is for some suppositories. The interpreter is too embarrassed to admit that he does not know the equivalent word for "suppository" in the patient's language, so he uses the word for "pill" instead. The patient takes the medication orally and ends up in the emergency room.
• After her appointment, a patient's husband asks the interpreter what the doctor said to his wife. Trying to be helpful, the interpreter discloses the happy news that the patient is pregnant. This is not happy news to the husband, as his wife has just arrived from their home country, after being apart from him for 6 months. The couple leaves the clinic with the husband angrily muttering thinly veiled threats of violence.
• The doctor asks the patient a question. The interpreter and the patient get into a long discussion, while the doctor sits and waits, completely left out. Finally the interpreter turns to the doctor and says "She said no." When the doctor asks exactly what the patient said, the interpreter smiles and says, "Oh, it wasn't important. She just means no."

Do these scenarios worry you? If you are a provider working with interpreters, a patient depending on interpreters, or an administrator responsible for interpreters, they should. These kinds of errors and more are very common among interpreters who have never received any training.

While it is common practice in medical centers to grab anyone who professes to speak another language to serve as an interpreter, the risks in doing so are very high. Untrained bilinguals are unaware of the role of the interpreter, the ethics of interpreting, the techniques involved in facilitating a patient-provider communication while staying in the background, the vocabulary involved in a medical interview. Inevitably they make mistakes, and mistakes in a health care setting can be serious, even fatal.