An Example

Imagine an elderly woman being brought to a hospital, accompanied by her grandson. The family has only recently moved to the USA from Oaxaca Mexico, but the elderly woman’s first language is Triqui Bajo, an indigenous Oaxacan language. While her grandson understands his grandmother’s speech and can communicate with her, his native language is Spanish.

If an Triqui Bajo interpreter were not provided, the woman would have to speak to her grandson in Triqui Bajo about the pain in her stomach, the grandson relaying her words to the best of his ability in Spanish to the interpreter or hospital staff. Like the children’s version of the “telephone game,” there’s a high chance that some, if not much, information will be lost. As the grandson was not well versed in Triqui Bajo, he may be missing critical vocabulary, such as anything from “fracture” to “pneumonia,” “hernia,” and beyond.

What this Means

This lack of a matching language pair can inhibit the service that a client receives. In severe cases in a medical setting, this can be a matter of life and death. This case study highlights the importance of translators and especially interpreters who are fluent in minority languages. It’s critical to find people with knowledge of these languages. If due to the last minute nature, an in-person interpreter is not available, remote interpretation methods should kick in.

Imagine that they were able to get an interpreter for Triqui Bajo and English; this would allow for a direct flow of communication between the elderly woman and the hospital staff. Response time for treatment would subsequently be quicker, and the woman might therefore feel more comfortable and confident that she is receiving adequate care. While the grandson might need his own English/Spanish interpreter to understand fully the treatment decisions, that could easily be delegated to another interpreter and not require a stretched out “telephone game” where meaning can be lost.

Monterey Language Services provides translation and interpretation services for all languages and is very strong in providing Triqui Bajo interpretation Services. Every day, we send Triqui Bajo interpreters to cover medical interpretation assignments or IEP (Individualized Education Program) assignments. There have been some high profile Triqui Bajo legal interpretation cases served by Monterey Language Services as well.

For the best results when translating, it is important to always think about the context in which the source text was written and how it might be perceived if brought to the target culture. What this means is that language and culture are always very tightly intertwined with one another, so what one language might find normal, another language might find abnormal or outright offensive. For example, in the Hopi Indian language, there is no word for time, so their understanding of time is very different from most of the world where there is a defined word and definition for time. Similarly, divorce does not have its own native word in most Indian languages, and they instead use the English word “divorce,” if they ever want to get a divorce. However, divorce rates are much lower than they might be in other places in the world, due to their culture seeing marriage as a lifetime commitment. These kinds of cultural differences is why you have to do a little research when you are translating.

Similarly, in Japan, they have adapted a lot of English words into their own language and use them on a daily basis, but if an English speaking person heard these words, they might have a different idea of what they mean. For example the word “lamp” might mean a kind of light that you might find on your desk or in the room, but in Japanese, it is used almost exclusively for indicator lights. So when you translate languages that use words that appear in the target language as well, be sure to make sure that they have the same meaning in both languages.

Another thing you should be careful of is avoiding idioms altogether if you can help it. Idioms are commonplace in any language, but there will not always be an equivalent idiom in the target language. Unless the idiom is very essential to the translation, you should try to figure out a different way of phrasing it. For example, the phrase “two birds, one stone.” There may be equivalents to this in some languages, but if the target language does not have an equivalent, then you could instead say “accomplish two things with one action” or something of the sort.

While translation can be a fairly straightforward process of just taking the source words and then convert it into the target language, it can often be much more complex than that. While fields such as technical and patent translation might encourage a more one to one translation, there are some styles, phrases, and references that just won’t translate if you adapt a one to one style. That is where some creative liberties come into play where the translator tries to find replacement words or phrases that won’t always have the exact meaning of the original, but will be able to give the same nuance or elicit the same kind of reaction as the original did in the source language.