6-Day Medical Interpreter Training Institute

Objectives:

To improve medical Spanish, interpreting, and translating for any medical professionals or personnel who use Spanish, serve as interpreters and translators, or bilingual staff who serve the public in Spanish.

To improve understanding of the interpreter’s role, Spanish-English medical language proficiency, cultural competency and its application, specialized terminology, and interpreting / translation techniques in order to reduce interpreter error and promote improved health care for Latinos

Curriculum includes:

Introductory Lectures on consecutive interpretation, sight translation, and simultaneous interpretation.

Specialized terminology, including vocabulary building in forensic pathology, regional dialects, medical document translation, physiology, and anatomy.

Major Diseases will be introduced through practice with medical dialogues between caregivers and patients that will include an introduction to the disease and questions about symptoms and treatment of the disease. Consent Forms and Other Medical Documents more Legalistic in Nature will be reviewed and practiced.

Ethics, Procedure, Protocol, and Multicultural Awareness, including five one-hour presentations devoted to these topics. The objective is to help interpreters understand their duties, responsibilities, and boundaries as interpreters and to improve their performance for the benefit of caregivers and patients. Special emphasis is placed on helping interpreters utilize their cultural competence to facilitate communication.

Intensive Interpreter Skill-Development, including intensive hours of drill, critique, and analysis in consecutive, sight translation, and simultaneous modes of interpretation using medical scripts that are geared to improve students’ ability to interpret between caregivers and patients.

Testing and Evaluation, using specially designed instruments in all three modes to determine participants’ areas of strength and recommend methods for continued development.

Personalized Attention. Students attending the training have a wide-variety of skill-levels and needs. In order to best instruct them, time is set aside for one-on-one practice skill-development sessions and feedback on their particular work situation.