Ji, Meng, Taibi, Mustapha and Ineke H.M. Crezee (eds) (2019). Multicultural Health Translation, Interpreting and Communication. Abingdon, Oxen and New York: Routledge, pp. 224, £ 120. ISBN 978 1138543089.
This recently published collection of ten essays, edited by Meng Ji, Mustapha Taibi and Ineke H.M. Crezee, delves into reflections on translation and interpreting research in healthcare services for ethnically diverse populations. It presents a collection of key articles on provision of accessible healthcare language services, the impact of medical translation and interpreting services on treatment efficacy, health translation assessment and methods, as well as health interpreting for specialised needs.
The first section of the volume, “Health translation and interpreting in national healthcare systems”, provides valuable literature and case studies on current provision, practice and measurement of healthcare language services in various countries. Crezee and Gordon analyse similar barriers to accessing medical care in Seattle and Auckland and compare the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic initiatives to improve health equality and literacy among new immigrants in two cities. In their essay, patient-centred language services with qualified professionals and navigators are highlighted for low-literate and disadvantaged patients. In the contribution of Squires, specific attention is paid to qualitative and quantitative methods measuring the influence of medical interpreting on patient outcomes. Squires suggests that electronic datasets, e.g. Electronic Health Records (EHRs), containing precise treatment data can improve in-depth understanding of interpreters’ role in medical treatment. The last contribution in this section, by Russell, explores legislation on sign language interpreting and training of interpreters in the international healthcare context, which provides a contrast to the situation in Canada where the deaf population cannot be sure to receive healthcare interpreting assistance. Against the traditional training model of generalists, Russell provokes thoughts on the education of health interpreting specialists and argues that deaf interpreters should be an integral part of interpreting programmes.
Part Two deals with “Developing culturally-appropriate health translation,” which not only analyses the health communication barriers caused by inadequate translation materials, but also introduces and explains ingenious strategies to optimise translation services in medical settings. Lin and Ji propose a patient-oriented and culturally-appropriate (POCA) analytical model for health translation evaluation based on an examination of diabetes education materials for Chinese immigrants in Australia. This new model offers a framework for the assessment of translation accessibility and readability as a response to the urgent need to improve health translation quality. The two subsequent contributions, drawing on the notion of functionalist translation, discuss the functional failures in health translation materials using different methodological approaches. Teng formulates a two-stage evaluation framework to assess and identify the pragmatic equivalence failures in a health brochure, whilst Sharkas conducts a corpus-driven study of translation methods applied in the Arabic translations of patient information leaflets. Both authors raise interesting questions for future studies on culturally-effective and patient-oriented translation strategies. Sharkas, for example, argues that the prevalent application of the source-language-oriented method is likely to cause low readability and understandability for the target readership. The section concludes with Taibi, Liamputtong and Polonsky’s empirical research based on the feedback of an Arabian community of older participants aimed at exploring the role of translation in promoting health awareness and facilitating knowledge reception among immigrant readers.
The last section of the collection takes as its focus the perspectives of health interpreters with discussions on their work domain, role definition, existing challenges, and prospective opportunities. It begins with a contribution by Swabey, Olson, Moreland and Drewek, who, facilitated by the job task analysis method, endeavour to describe and understand sign language interpreters’ perceptions of their jobs by comparing their job task importance and frequency with those of other healthcare interpreting groups. Also in this section, Major and Napier explore health interpreters’ role in the interaction between patients and health practitioners, arguing that experienced interpreters tend to reposition their role flexibly and fluidly according to situation-specific needs. Finally, the contribution by Bot concludes that telephone interpreting in mental healthcare, despite its strengths in efficiency and convenience, may disappoint both interpreters and clients in terms of conversation fluency, rendition quality and working relationship. The findings of this chapter reflect what a health interpreter does and how he/she does it and shed light on the understanding of health interpreting as a challenging, professional and relational practice. However, the issue of generalisability remains in some of the chapters due to relatively small sample sizes.
This book highlights the latest research paths and provides ample evidence of the vitality of scholarship on the interdisciplinary studies of translation, interpreting and public health. Besides, it presents practical and innovative approaches to the study of accessible healthcare services in multicultural and multilingual societies. As a book covering a variety of research topics in health translation and interpreting, it presents a good example of easy-to-read materials and easy-to-understand knowledge.
Ziqing Lyu
Jiangsu University of Science and Technology
E-mail: Julieree1234@163.com