Medical Interpreting Live Practice Sessions with MiTio

What is a Medical Interpreting Practice Session like? Here are my notes from medical interpreting practice sessions for MiTio students enrolled in the Medical Interpreting Diploma Program.

I attended my first Medical Interpreting Practice Session in September 2020.

We covered different scenarios, learning quite a lot of medical terminology for interpreters:

1. The first exercise was about the description of a female body that showed evidence of various abrasions. In particular, there was an abrasion and contusion of the frontal forehead. The woman had brown hair. There was no other evidence of trauma to the head, nor any evidence of fracture of the facial bones, but there were other fractures and multiple abrasions. The mouth was rigidly set. The neck was symmetrical and the trachea was palpable at the mid-line.

2. The second exercise was a medical study about immunity, the ability of a body to defend itself from an infection. The human body is constantly exposed to the action of these organisms commonly known as germs. In many cases the germs would cause immediate death if the body did not have immunity against them. Under normal natural conditions, immunity is the ability to resist that all species have.

3. The third piece was a dialogue. An attorney had asked a Doctor to take a look at an injury caused by an accident at work. The patient worked in construction and cut his index finger with a saw and a part of his middle finger. The patient was left-handed, and had cut his fingers from his left hand. The patient described how he cut his fingers.

4. The fourth interpreter continued with the same dialogue as the previous one. The patient had removed a protection gear in order to work faster, but then he cut his fingers. He was holding the saw with the right hand, and he used the left hand to guide the wood. A part of the finger was still hanging from the hand, but the first aid doctor cut it off completely because he said that it was impossible to heal it. The other finger that was partially cut became crooked. The doctor asked what the patient could do with his hand.

5. The fifth piece was a mental health session with a 15-year-old who used to be part of a gang. The boy was in and out of school, and helped his parents at work, or just played with friends. He obtained low grades and he was probably going not to pass the year, but he didn’t care. He had lived in the US for two or three years. He crossed the border when he was 12 years old. His father is not always at home. He was ordered to attend the mental health session because a boy named Paco was stabbed by a local gang. The Doctor asked about what had happened and informed the boy that everything he said would be kept confidential. The boy admitted that he had been a member of a gang for a few weeks and described what he had been doing with the gang lately.

6. The sixth interpreter kept on with the same interview as the previous one. The conversation moved on to describing what happened on August 13th, when Paco was stabbed. The doctor asked about the place where Paco was stabbed. Paco was stabbed in the school yard, but the boy does not remember who was present at the time when Paco was stabbed.

7. The seventh medical scenario was a visit with the psychiatrist. The patient asks permission to keep standing. The doctor explains what the session is going to be like. The doctor is going to ask about the patient’s emotions, financial and occupational state. The patient says that she has already told everything to her lawyer, but she is willing to collaborate and repeat it all again. The doctor explains that some questions can make her feel emotional, but they are standard compulsory questions that he has to ask. The patient was born in a small village in Mexico in 1956. She completed her education until the sixth grade, then she got pregnant during her seventh grade and dropped out of school.

8. I took part in the session as the eighth interpreter, and I interpreted a visit with a doctor who prescribed two medicines to a patient, one for the nausea and the other one for the pain, with different details on how and when to take them.

The whole session was very useful. I learned a lot of vocabulary, and I learned what kind of translations are acceptable and what other translations are not acceptable, because they are considered as adding or omitting information in a US medical interpreting setting.

During other sessions, we also practiced a different technique: sight translation, which is paramount for translating medical documents to patients.

Additional notes from a Medical Interpreting Practice Session in November 2020:

The technique we used during this session was different from the one used during other sessions, because we interpreted into our mother tongue and then back into English. So, I had the opportunity to practice interpreting in both directions, which was quite useful for my training. The aim of this exercise is to learn how to take notes. In addition to that, the trainer was able to understand what exactly we were interpreting, even though she did not know all of our languages. Moreover, the session was useful because the practice included people interpreting into French, Spanish, and Portuguese, which are my other languages of work. The trainer also provided us with links to the translations into our languages of work.

Additional notes from a Medical Interpreting Practice Session in December 2020:

We practiced on longer chunks of text, in order to improve our note-taking ability that will be necessary for a career as a medical interpreter. At the end of the lesson, the tutor also showed us her note-taking technique.

For more information on the MiTio Online Certificate Course and Diploma Program for Medical Interpreters, click on this link.