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When we think of the variety of venues where interpreters work, it is easy to name at least a few subsets of vocabulary that come up on a consistent basis. In our initial and ongoing training as judiciary interpreters, we are reminded continually of the terms we might encounter in expert testimony on subjects such as DNA, firearms, and fingerprint evidence. However, we often overlook medical terminology, despite how often anatomy and physiology are involved in our work.
It is easy to forget how the medical field is so closely related to what we do every day as judiciary interpreters and thus assume our general understanding of the subject will be sufficient without any proactive learning efforts. Even apparently simple processes such as examining, evaluating, and treating a patient can be beyond what we passively learn while working in the court setting. We often limit our studies to bilingual glossaries and dictionaries for general definitions and translations, sometimes consulting an encyclopedic resource for contextual information. Actively seeking out opportunities beyond the encyclopedia, however, will help us develop a full understanding of commonly discussed medically-related themes.
Working as a medical interpreter for nearly a decade prior to my career with the courts has proven to be a lifesaver when it comes to interpreting medically-related testimony from lay and expert witnesses. Back then, my task was to interpret for just about every aspect of life and death, including clinical symptoms, corrective surgeries,medico-social themes, psychological illness, and beyond. Years later,knowing how often medical issues come up in court has made me realize how helpful it is to have worked in that field, leading me to advocate for others to find ways to gain broad medical knowledge as well.
As we know, actively searching for understanding to connect words to their context is an effort that rewards us with better performance as judiciary interpreters. Knowing how mental illness affects the dynamics of a family, for example, or how a psychiatric patient interacts with society might help us better understand a defendant or witness in court. Our interpreting for a traumatized victim or a witness with head trauma might be enhanced if we have an understanding of the signs and symptoms of mental trauma or how speech is affected after a brain injury.
It is easy to overestimate our knowledge base about medical issues because of our life experiences. We have all been sick, so we know the basic organs and body parts, and this knowledge is probably pretty similar in all of our working languages. Even when we are well versed in medical themes because of passive knowledge gained in life, it is amazing how even personal comfort levels can be a barrier to the search for understanding,especially when dealing with taboo or intimate themes. This was apparent during an interpreting class I once taught, where the majority of the female students had shockingly limited knowledge about the various basic structures of female genitalia.Thus, we cannot say that everyone holds the same passive knowledge of anatomy and physiology, despite having their own bodies as an example.
