Youth Interpret Medical Terms
June 25, 2004
Sandy Zhou was just 12 years old when she found herself in a cold hospital room with her mother and a physician who told her that her mother needed an emergency hysterectomy. Zhou had only been in the United States for two years. Still struggling to grasp basic English, she had to understand and translate the physician’s orders regarding her mother’s surgery. At the time, there weren’t any Cantonese interpreters on hand at San Francisco General Hospital.
“I had a really hard time and I never want to go through that again,” Zhou, now 17, said. “I was scared that my translation wasn’t right and I would say the wrong thing to my mom and hurt my mom’s health. I wasn’t good in English to begin with, and there were all these medical terms that were really difficult to understand and pronounce.”
Often, Limited English Proficient Asian Pacific Americans rely on their children for translation when they are unaware of translation services or interpreters are unavailable. But the stress of interpreting medical terminology accurately and relaying a doctor’s diagnosis is too much for the children, says a coalition of civil rights organizations, child advocacy groups and medical professionals.
David Dao, an on-call certified medical interpreter at SFGH, provides translation services in Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese to mostly seniors, low-income recent immigrants and mentally or physically disabled patients. He said he has seen children as young as 10 years old translating for their parents, a trend he believes puts an unfair pressure on the children and puts the parents at risk for potential health disasters.
“Even the Asian kids who grew up here in the United States or were born here have a difficult time translating medical terms; think about how hard it is for those that just came here,” Dao said. “But it’s not just young children who are placed in awkward positions; even adults have a hard time telling their mothers or female relatives that they have gynecological problems or fathers that they have urinary problems. I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
For the past eight years, Rosalio Gomez has been a medical interpreter at SFGH, and he also said medical translation is a tremendous responsibility for children, one that he believes is too much to ask a young child.
“I’ve had mothers who’ve been discharged after pregnancy and I tell them that they can’t have sexual intercourse for six weeks — you can’t have your children tell you that,” Gomez said. “Or what about telling the parents about intimate issues, such as vaginal care. It’s not correct for a child to have to do this.”
Prompted by his own experiences with translating for his mother as a child, Assemblyman Leland Yee authored a bill last year that would ban the use of child interpreters younger than 15 by any state or local agency or program that receives state funding. The bill, AB 292, passed the Assembly and is now awaiting a Senate vote.
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