Language Barriers Preventing Effective Communication

Alyssa Weisberger

MGT 200-80

Professor Marciniec

Unit 4 Exercise

http://globalag.igc.org/elderrights/world/2004/barrier.htm

            The article that I chose to discuss has to do with a man named Tan Le who moved to Hartford, CT in 1993 after living in Vietnamese concentration camps, and what his story has to do with language barriers preventing effective communication. After fleeing Vietnam and finally coming to Connecticut, he felt tired all of the time. Even when he would walk around his small apartment it would wear him out completely, and he would have to lie back down and rest. After dealing with this for too long, he decided to go to a clinic in Hartford to try to find some answers. But, he was not English speaking because he had lived in Vietnam hi whole life. Whilst at the clinic, they figured that his issue was that he was depressed. He would constantly return to this clinic to seek help, but the answer was always that he was depressed.

Finally, one day, a Vietnamese community advocate, Le Lien Smith, who has a degree in psychology brought Tan Le to the clinic because she had a feeling that the answer wasn’t that he was just depressed. She suspected that he had diabetes, so she told them to test him for it; and it turned out that he did have diabetes all along, which explained why he was constantly drained. This article has to do with language barriers preventing effective communication, and this tends to be common in clinics and hospitals. Hospitals to try to work towards having more translators or even translating technology. Several hospitals, including Yale New Haven Hospital, have technology where people can talk into a telephone to a live interpreter of 150 languages 24/7. Also, an amazing thing that Windham Hospital has done is offer its Spanish speaking employees a course to help them translate medical terms. Having language barriers that prevent effective communication can be very detrimental to a business or a situation running smoothly. Whether someone can’t understand someone else because they simply don’t speak the same language, or even if they have a heavy accent, is very important to understand and try to figure out ways to overcome.

This article was written in the past, and technologies and protocols have definitely improved since this was published, but if this were current day and the hospital/clinic simply didn’t have access to the technology at the time, there’s several things that they could have done. First of all, in this line of business, it is critical for patients and doctors/nurses to be able to understand each other. So, it is necessary to spend the money to either get better translating technology, or hire translators for the most common languages. But, in my opinion, I think that the best way to go about it is to invest in the telephone technology that translates 150 languages on the spot. I believe that this is the best decision because if a hospital were to hire translators that spoke Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Polish, there is a great chance that 1) people of other languages would need their language to be translated and there wouldn’t be a way to, and 2) those translators would be getting paid even if there wasn’t someone for them to actively translate for. So, definitely the best option would be to go for the telephone technology. Therefore, for hospitals or clinics to better handle a situation that includes a language barrier that prevents effective communication, I think that they should invest in technology that will be able to translate on the spot.