Should Doctors be Medical Translators?

Should Doctors be Medical Translators?

Should Doctors be Medical Translators?

by: Medical Translation WorksInterviewed by:Cristina Mrquez Arroyo de CamihortYou're a doctor and a translator. What reasons would make a doctor take up this profession? I do not know what may be the reasons that have led other doctors to take uptranslation as a profession, but in my case it was simply a love story, and like all love stories, mine is a complex one, convoluted, and too long to explain. It all started, as it sometimes happens with a persons great passions, in a very unromantic way: I was 28, with two children and making a meager wage as a resident physician, and needed additional income to make ends meet; and translation was the means for providing it. This thouroughbred business relation rapidly started to transform into a sense of pleasure and affection that made translation my favorite hobby, and later on, into an overwhelming and absorbing passion for everything related to the words, language, and specialized terms in medicine. In 1992, an unforeseen event opened the possibility of doing something that until then I had not even imagine even in dreams: to throw away more than ten years of medical training and a bright future in Spain as a medical specialist to devote myself entirely to doing scientific translations and to exile myself to a country, Switzerland, with which I had no ties or knew anything, including the language. Crazy stunts like this, of course, can only be explained, and only barely, by passion, but they are also the kind of things that make life so very beautiful.There are many doctors who oppose having translators with no medical training do medical translations. On the other hand, many translators believe that physicians can not translate properly because they have no domain of the language, is there a halfway point? Every time I hear that doctors can not write, which is practically everytime the question arises, it makes me laugh so. It's like me saying that lawyers do not know how to taste a good wine or that translators can not play music. I guess that among translators there will be some that do not distinguish one musical note from the next and some others who can play an instrument much like the angels. Otherwise, it would be a pity that authors such as John Keats, Pio Baroja, Oliver Sacks, Anton Chekhov, William Somerset Maugham,Louis-Ferdinand Cline,Mariano Azuela,Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Campos andWilliam Carlos Williams would not have known how to write better, for they were all doctors.It is clear that if a physician has never concerned herself with the use of language or if he does not show some sensitivity to issues concerning style, the texts he will produce would be awkward, thick, and cumbersome, but the same could be said about any other profession, including that of the translator. Among doctors, as among translators, there are those who write really well and those who write really badly.In any case, the optimal solution seems clear: the translator should be a medical doctor who writes well or a translator with deep knowledge of medical texts and the specialized language of medicine. Among the professional medical translators I know, many are medical graduates, many are licensed in translation, and many more have not studied any of these two careers (there are chemists, linguists, biologists, terminologists, lawyers, etc.). . The one thing that is clear to me is that medical translations should be done by medical translators only, and that is not so nowadays.http://www.articlesbase.com/medicine-articles/should-doctors-be-medical-translators-3596646.html

POST COMMENT

Famous and Infamous Medical Symbols Seek The Web For A Canada Pharmacy That Features Low-Cost Prescription Prescription Drugs Medical Malpractice: Make Sure You Don't Become a Victim Ultimate Personal Solutions- Cure To Alcohol And Drug Addictions Or A Hoax? Current US customs policy and practice around Canadian mail order drugs The Making of Lab Coats and Medical Scrubs with Permanent Antimicrobial Properties Medical Assistant Careers Becoming A Phlebotomist Benefit of Buying Medicine from Cheap Prescription Medicine Pharmacy Best Practices in Planning for an Alcohol and Drug Policy 3 Best Practices in Implementing an Alcohol and Drug Policy OTC Drug Abuse at Work – Employer Issues Medical Colleges 5 Practical Issues to Think About in Random Drug Testing