Culture-oriented healthcare translation and interpreting has become an area of increasing importance in Specialised Translation Studies over the past decade. However, translators and interpreters working with a particular language pair are often confronted with practical difficulties in managing complicated technical terms and jargon in various healthcare settings. Translation educators also struggle with helping translators and interpreters convert their declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge with regard to improving their translation competence systematically in healthcare translation and interpreting. In this respect, the book under review can be seen as a successful companion volume to the previous publication Introduction to Healthcare for Interpreters and Translators (Crezee 2013), which takes a novel stance on didactics by introducing and analysing intercultural factors and demonstrates how the situated learning model (González Davies 2004) can be incorporated into didactics and applied to translator and interpreter training.
The book is organised in three main parts that are further divided into 28 chapters. The first part starts out with a detailed introduction to the use of this handbook with an account of cultural differences. The authors do not merely concentrate on accurate interpreting and translation to both doctors and their patients, but also on interpreters’ and translators’ roles as mediators between different cultures in healthcare settings. More specifically, the interpreters and translators who use this book are encouraged to acquire healthcare-related terminology management skills and create simulated situations to effectively build up their declarative knowledge systems. This is greatly in line with González Davies’ (2004: 8) proposal that interpreter and translator training should focus on “theoretical and practical knowledge of the professional code and conduct” and provide “semi-authentic simulated opportunities for interpreting practice.”
In the second part, a holistic interpreting and translation competence was introduced into the situated learning model, with which practising interpreters and translators can develop their ability to undertake culture-related communication with doctors and their patients. This part covers a wide spectrum of terminology management skills required in interpreting and translation for various healthcare settings, which indicates that using (semi-)authentic situations is central to interactive didactics. With respect to this, the authors provide a large number of concrete questions that doctors may ask and the corresponding answers that patients may give in each context. Thus, interpreters and translators can strengthen their understanding of healthcare settings and become mentally prepared for and capable of producing accurate output before they embark on healthcare translation and interpreting tasks.
The third part is practice-oriented and presents a sound overview of the main systems of the human body based on the general classification of medical disciplines, including the nervous system, the circulatory system, the respiratory system, blood disorders, and so forth. The authors build up glossary pairs between English and Arabic and provide step-by-step instructions to help readers observe the intrinsic links between the glossary pairs. More importantly, these glossary pairs can be aligned with translation memory systems in computer-aided translation. This means that the book will save the translators and interpreters time and effort collecting jargon from mountains of healthcare-related dictionaries and medical books.
Overall, applying situated learning to Translation Studies not merely enables interpreters and translators to familiarise themselves with medical jargon, but also helps develop translation memories and construct parallel corpora pertaining to healthcare discourse. In the healthcare context, even those translators and interpreters with years of experience of working in a particular area may face difficulties in using technical terms appropriately due to the complicated nature of the jargon. They may either seek advice from subject-matter experts (although such advice is not always available) or consult a guide book, a dictionary or other resources to facilitate their assignments. In this respect, this book demonstrates the potential of situated learning for translation pedagogy and sheds some light on Corpus-based Translation Studies (Feng 2017), thus widening the boundaries of traditional approaches to accommodate Specialised Translation Studies. Therefore, the book is a welcome contribution to translator and interpreter training and is warmly recommended to anyone who shows an interest in healthcare translation and interpreting.
Haoda Feng
Bohai University
E-mail: leblanc.feng@yahoo.co.nz