Medical information can easily get lost in the translation.

We would always need to translate our medical language into plain generally used English, German, Dutch, French or whatever our patients are using.

Living like a fish outside the water

You might have noted that English is not my mother language. That would be German. So every day at my work I am forced by the situation to live and practice in a “not-natural” environment. I am very aware, that this way of living as a fish outside of water is now my new normal.

Medical information can easily get lost in the translation, more so, when you are working outside your mother language.

What about the “Englishmen”?

But what about the “Englishmen”?
What about people who generally have lived, functioned and worked all their life in only one language? I have noted that some might be less aware of this need of translation or of their lack of “translation skill”.

It is almost a running gag with native English-speakers, their apologetic awareness, that they never “learned” a foreign language to fluency. While they admit that they “struggle” with different tongues, there is a high expectation everybody else will need to fill this “skills gap”.

Medical information can easily get lost in the translation, when you lack that awareness that translating is a skill.

An illustration

A friend of mine moved from the United States to a European country. Here he wanted to make a living for himself. So he became aware, that he needed to learn the local language.

We met regularly with a shared passion and three months into his learning journey, he suddenly told me: “Honey, this is weird. When I try to speak in my new language, I know in my mind, what I want to say. But then the words would not come. I feel like an idiot.”

My reply was: “Welcome to the club. This is how the rest of the world feels, when we are forced to learn and speak English.”

Medical information can easily get lost in the translation, when we expect that the patient just bridges the gap themselves.

Eyes opened, and now?

What are our obstacles in translating “medical” to “normal” language?

Some obstacles are hidden, as I have described in the post about the curse of knowledge. 

Some troubles originate from the complexity and uncertainty we need to introduce to parents, and I have described some strategies for those two aspects in previous posts. 

The baseline is the “English problem” the lack of awareness, that we need to …

• learn the skill of translation. This is not a one-step process, but initially requires that we …
• produce a supportive “plain” vocabulary for our medical concepts, and then…
• it requires practice. The phase of practicing will in the first place feel uncomfortable. 

In a nutshell:

Our paediatric patients and their parents are like fish out of the water with our medical language.

Medical information can easily get lost in the translation, when we lack the skill of translation.

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The process of communication

The curse of knowledge

How to deal with complexity

How to deal with uncertainty