Consecutive Interpreting Course for Medical Interpreters
Posted by Interpreter Education Online on May 5, 2011
Medical interpreters play a vital role in providing language access to health care patients who don’t speak English well. The access is guaranteed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits the discrimination of people by any agency that receives federal funding. This includes discrimination based on an individual’s inability to speak and/or understand English. Essentially, this means that any federally funded recipients, such as courts, hospitals or any other entity shall offer LEP clients, patients and consumers proactive language assistance. Some states take this even further. California, for example, has even gone so far as to require that insurance companies provide interpreters to claimants who have limited English proficiency.
Unfortunately, as important and necessary as trained medical interpreters are, there is a shortage of them. For many hospitals, medical interpreters usually come in the form of a patient’s relative or friend. This is always a bad choice because, most likely, those relatives or friends are unfamiliar with medical terminology or with interpreter ethics and that can lead to disastrous results. In addition, there is also a shortage of training programs for medical interpreters. It is essential that those wishing to become interpreters in the health care field have access to qualified training programs. For some patients, having access to qualified medical interpreters is truly a matter of life and death. This is why having industry standards and a national certification process is so important.
Currently, there are two organizations that oversee the certification process for medical interpreters: the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI) and The Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI). The NBCMI and the CCHI are both aiming to become the “standard” in the medical interpretation industry. Both bodies deal with certifying medical interpreters, but they differ in their testing procedures. The CCHI requires consecutive, simultaneous, sight translation as well as translation. NBCMI’s tests, on the other hand, place significant emphasis on knowledge of medical terminology and do not test a candidate’s fluency in simultaneous interpreting. Both organizations are similar, however, in that they require medical interpreters to take part in at least 40 hours of training before seeking certification.
In order to help in meeting the requirements of the certifying bodies and to accommodate the goals of aspiring and practicing medical interpreters, Interpreter Education Online will begin to offer Basic, Advanced, and Single Topic courses for medical interpreters in the near future. These courses will meet the needs of the students whose ultimate goals are to pass a certification exam, develop interpretation techniques through language-specific training, expand their knowledge of the medical system and specialized topics, and improve their performance in the hospital or other medical environments.
With that in mind, Interpreter Education Online is happy to announce the first course for medical interpreters – a single topic unit on Consecutive Interpretation. The course is available in the following language combinations: English < > Albanian, Arabic, French, Haitian-Creole, Hmong, German, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The course lasts 2 weeks, and students will be able to practice interpretation exercises in their language, develop their note-taking skills, expand their vocabulary, and grow their collection of semantic equivalents, all while working with qualified instructors or choosing to work independently. After finishing the Initial Exercise and the Final Consecutive Exercise, students will receive a Certificate of Completion at the end of the course.
For more information, please visit our Programs page.
Filed Under: Language Issues, Medical Interpreting
