Blog

Diagnosing Language Access Failures in Healthcare: Five Signs Your Program Needs More Support

​​​​​​
In 2014, a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl arrived in an emergency department with what looked like a stomach bug. No interpreter was available. The physician communicated medication instructions through her 16-year-old brother. Those instructions were misunderstood, and she died of an adverse drug reaction.

That is the most catastrophic version of what can go wrong when translation and interpretation services are not reaching patients when they need them. The everyday version is less dramatic, but much more common. Here is just one of many possible scenarios: A discharge planner hands a packet of instructions to a patient with limited English proficiency (LEP). The patient nods politely. Two weeks later, the same patient is back in the emergency room with a complication that the instructions would have prevented, had they been properly translated.

What Quality Means in Translation and Interpretation (and Why AI Alone Will Not Get You There)

​​​​​​​
In 1980, a teenager named Willie Ramirez was left quadriplegic after a single mistranslated word led his doctors to misdiagnose him. Decades later, an Iranian man was denied immigration relief and detained for more than two years because he and his interpreter didn’t speak the same dialect.
​​​​​​​
These are two cases. There are thousands more, and they all share a common cause: a failure of translation or interpretation quality.
Here is the problem: Every language service company claims to be “high quality.” But if you do not speak the target languages yourself, how would you know?