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”. Continue reading Read More