Greetings:

Hablamos Juntos is pleased to send you the second in our new bi-monthly series of brief reports on issues of interest to language services professionals and clinicians nationwide.

The report Developing Better Non-English Materials: Understanding the Limits of Translation, shares lessons learned regarding barriers faced by health care organizations in producing useful translated text and in evaluating those products for quality.

Clear communication between patients and their doctors is essential in order for patients to receive safe, high quality health care. Written health materials are an important means of communication and federal laws require health care organizations to translate “vital” documents for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). Why is production of non-English materials (those written in languages other than English) a struggle for health care organizations? How can health organizations improve the quality of materials for their non-English speaking patients?

Developing Better Non-English Materials describes the experience and challenges encountered by the Hablamos Juntos demonstrations and offers new insight and perspectives on questions, such as these:

• Why translating English original documents into other languages is a challenge for healthcare organizations;
  
  
• What Hablamos Juntos learned from studying patterns of errors in translations and why these errors may occur;
  
  
• Why differences in languages, and culturally determined communication styles and forms of expression place insurmountable limits to the process of translation;
  
  
• What health care organizations can do to help translators make more effective translation decisions and produce useful non-English materials; and
  
  
• Why paying attention to the function or the purpose of text can help improve the quality of written health care information.

Overall, Hablamos Juntos found health care organizations have broad misconceptions about the translation process. Read Developing Better Non-English Materials to learn how a lack of training opportunities for translators along with a lack of effective methods to evaluate translated text have contributed to an extraordinary number of poorly translated text now in circulation in health organizations. Further, misguided standards - such as using “back-to-English” translation to check quality - may actually contribute to poor translation. This is why Hablamos Juntos has continued to work with linguists, translators and researchers to develop practical tools to help health organizations develop useful non-English materials. In the coming months, we will debut a series of tools designed to help evaluate whether materials should be translated or not, how to work more effectively with translators to produce more useful text, and how to assess the quality of translated materials.

Thank you for your continuing interest in the work of Hablamos Juntos and our common effort to provide the best possible care to all patients, regardless of their preferred language.

Yolanda Partida, MSW, DPA
Director National Program Office
Hablamos Juntos II – Language Policy and Practice in Health Care
UCSF Fresno, Center for Medical & Education Research

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