Sen. Edward’s Medical Translation Plan a Prescription for Failure

WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. ENGLISH, Inc. today raised questions about a national medical translation system proposed by Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

Campaigning before the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), Sen. Edwards proposed a translation system that would establish a 24-hour language hotline for use by smaller hospitals and those in rural areas. Larger hospitals in the 100 most populous cities would get additional resources to provide on-call translators for five of the most common languages. “We need to stop differences in language and culture from interfering with good health care,” said Sen. Edwards.

U.S. ENGLISH, Inc. agrees with this sentiment, but warns that Sen. Edwards plan is a prescription for failure. A recent study published in the medical journal Pediatrics shows that healthcare translation errors are common and can be dangerous to patients who don’t speak English. Dr. Glenn Flores and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin examined the transcripts of 13 audiotaped visits of Spanish speaking patients to a pediatrics clinic. Six encounters involved an official hospital interpreter; seven involved an “ad hoc” interpreter like a nurse, social worker, or, in one case, an 11-year-old sibling. The official interpreters made 231 errors; 53 percent of them were judged to have the potential to cause clinical problems. The ad hoc interpreters made 165 errors, and 77 percent of them were potentially dangerous.

In addition to endangering the lives of immigrants, Sen. Edward’s plan leaves too many unanswered questions. Multilingual government is enormously expensive. Who is going to pay for these translators? Will there be translators for all 329 languages spoken in the United States? If not, why do some groups get translators, but not others? Who is going to be held responsible for translation errors? If a patient who speaks no English stumbles into the emergency room, how will the staff know what language he speaks just by looking at him?

“If Sen. Edwards wants to help improve healthcare for Hispanics, the best thing he can do is push for more classes that teach English to the 21.3 million Americans (eight percent of the population) that are not proficient in English,” said Mauro E. Mujica, Chairman of U.S. ENGLISH, Inc. “There is no substitute for direct doctor-patient interaction. Medical translations are notoriously inaccurate and can have fatal consequences for immigrants. In addition they are a costly and unnecessary burden on an already overworked and understaffed medical system.”

U.S. English, Inc. is the nation's oldest and largest non-partisan citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. Founded in 1983 by the late Sen. S.I. Hayakawa of California, U.S. English, Inc. (www.usenglish.org) now has more than 1.8 million members.