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The Skills For Medical Interpreters Must Necessitate Competence in a Healthcare Field and Bilingual Skills

19th July, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

To translate medical and pharmaceutical texts is quite a specific and tough task which requires suitable qualification, preferably a degree in both Medicine and in language studies and experience in the subject medical area.The Medical Translation will be good, only if the subject text is well understood by the translator, so extensive language knowledge is simply not enough. Medical and scientific writing has its own turn of phrase, so somebody may possess excellent bi-lingual skills, but hiring him or her as a translator is a sure-fire recipe for disaster in translation, unless he or she is also an expert in the field. For instance, if you open a German English dictionary, you may find “anamnesis” as a counterpart of the German word ‘anamnese’, commonly used in German medical texts. A translator, who does not know that the expression medical doctors use in their practice is “case history of a patient” will simply translate it as “anamnesis”, which in fact, is never used. On the other hand, the task of somebody who is an experienced medical doctor but has poor language skills would not be easier. For instance, a subject expert may spend many a sleepless night over the English equivalent of Patientengut, a German word best translated as “patient records”.

Medical translation services are of particular significance, especially nowadays, because the field is constantly developing and most of the publications are written in English or German. That a medical translation error can have serious, even lethal consequences on patient’s health and devastate his or her family is undeniable, so if we need German Translation Services it is best to contact a reliable and reputed translator.

It is almost the same with other languages. If we look trough an English – Spanish dictionary we will be stricken by the fact that it abounds in direct translations from English that frequently do not correspond to the terms actually used in Spanish medical practice. It is not rare that there is another term for a given item or process in the target language, which is not accounted for in the dictionary. Two examples to support this statement: the terms radioscopia and antibiograma of which you can find a definition in monolingual Spanish dictionaries, but if you open a Spanish-English dictionary you will come across their more common English equivalents:”fluoroscopy”and “antibiotic sensitivity test”. This has led many agencies and freelancers who render Spanish Interpreter to use the English terminology(fluoroscopia and prueba de sensibilidad a los antibióticos), because they are not aware that commonly used Spanish counterparts exist.We must also bear in mind that there is a difference between a medical translator and a medical interpreter.

A medical interpreter helps the doctor and the patient overcome language barriers, while a medical translator deals with written texts, for example, patient records or various legally required medical documents.In the health care profession, medical translators are divided into the category of generalists and specialists. A translator, who is not specialized in any specific area, although he or she may have wide experience and a medical or a language degree, is usually classified as a generalist medical translator. Specialized translators are those medical translators who have gained specific training within a specialty field that gives them an increased acquaintance with the terminology and its usage in the given language.