CULTURAL PERCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS – THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM (INTRODUCTION)
The importance of communication skills as a component of clinical expertise has been accepted without question by the health professions. They are never more bereft, therefore, than when they lose the opportunity to use those skills because of an inability to speak the language of their patients. Translators alone cannot retrieve the loss when a cultural difference between doctor and patient is seen, by one or other of them, to prevent a shared perception of the matter in hand. If an interpreter is available much more can, of course, be done to bridge the gap. Before discussing the pitfalls and problems of different sorts of translators, it is worthwhile recording this author’s local experience, which is that doctors and nurses underuse translation services because they have become so used to working to a lower standard without them.
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