Towards A Mode For Cultivating Medical Interpreters In China

Medical interpreting, one of the interpreting professions, has its own distinct characteristics. It is defined by the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) as "that which takes place in health care settings of any sort, including doctor’s offices, clinics, hospitals, home health visits, mental health clinics, and public health presentations. Typically the setting is an interview between a health care doctor and a patient.’Medical interpreters in Chinese society are badly in need. Medical colleges and universities in the mainland China, however, have not cultivated qualified medical interpreters, nor have there been enough discussions on related issues in the academic circles. The author of this paper tries to give his own suggestions on how to develop a format to cultivate qualified medical interpreters in China by analyzing the curricula of English majors in Chinese medical universities and by drawing upon the successful cases in other countries. To this end, an investigation among the training candidates majoring medicine and English was carried out so as to test the students’cognition toward this format. The author discovers that:(1) medical students have lower cognition to medical interpreting learning than that of English major students;(2) medical students are significantly more confidently in learning medical knowledge and medical terminology than that of English major students;(3) there is no significant difference among medical students and English students in learning medical interpreting skills;(4) English major students’ cognition to the format is significantly higher than that of medical students.Based on the above analyses and investigation, the author proposes a much changed mode built on the English major in Chinese medical colleges and universities, including activating interpreting courses earlier for English majors in medical colleges and universities, adding courses of medical interpreting together with supplementary courses such as medical terminology, introducing foreign medical interpreting teachers to teach foreign medical interpreting textbooks, and inviting teachers from the medical circle. It is also advisable to encourage some medical majors to work for degrees for English majors, to make the practice system for medical interpreting highly market-oriented and to integrate the resources from colleges and universities, hospitals and even the whole society.