Project Report On Cross-cultural Barriers In Medical Interpretation

This report is based on the reporter's two medical interpreting experiences: one project is the medical software system cooperation of ABC company in Nanjing, and the other is the pilot platform cooperation of Jiangsu Life Science and Technology Innovation Park.Previous project reports in this field centered on the lack of technical expertise,psychological pressure and inadequate preparation, while the reporter focused on three specific cultural factors, i.e. knowledge culture, ideas culture and language culture.Barriers in knowledge culture are similar to the lack of professional knowledge in earlier project reports. However, knowledge is advancing with the times, and different professional knowledge keeps emerging with the further development of the projects.Therefore, new technical terms should be organized. Different from the past project reports, the reporter analyzes two other obstacles, namely, ideas culture and language culture, including difference in the mode of thinking between Chinese and Western cultures, different attitudes toward occupational titles and barriers in interpreting idioms.The reporter analyzes these three main problems with practical examples in this report. According to her experience and research, she summarizes and comes up with two solutions: firstly, to expand knowledge reserves by learning from daily lives and listening back to recordings; secondly, to learn to convert, i.e. convert unfamiliar words into synonyms, convert different thinking patterns between Chinese and Western cultures and convert the oral interpretation into drawing pictures. The barriers that were occurred in these two projects and the solutions drawn from that will provide practical reference to MTI students and interpretation learners.