Time was, the biggest risk of miscommunication in hospitals arose from the bad handwriting of doctors. But according to the British Medical Journal, there's a new menace stalking the emergency wards these days, Google Translate.
Anyone who has ever resorted to that technological wonder (Google Translate, I mean, not the BMJ), even in a non-medical context, might have reason to be nervous about the thought of it being relied on during hospital treatment. And yet it sometimes is, apparently.
British medics find themselves on occasion having to make quick decisions about patients across a gulf of mutual miscomprehension, and where no human interpreters are available. When that happens, GT may be resorted to, with mixed results.
For the purposes of a survey, as reported by the journal, 10 common medical phrases were auto-translated into 26 different languages. Then human speakers of the languages translated the results back into English, revealing an assortment of horrors.
In one case, I needed to have the medical English translated too. Thus the word “fitting”, as I now know, can also be the present participle of a verb meaning “to have seizures”. As such it featured in the worst mistranslation, whereby the phrase “your child is fitting” became, in Swahili, “your child is dead”.
Only slightly less terrible was the Polish translation of a suggestion – used to relatives when the patient is indeed deceased, or nearly – “your husband has the opportunity to donate his organs”. Thanks to Google Translate, this becomes: “Your husband can donate his tools”.
Other mistakes were at least borderline poetic. Googled into Marathi (an Indian language), the sentence “your husband had a cardiac arrest” comes out as “your husband had an imprisonment of heart”. And then there’s the phrase “your wife needs to be ventilated”, which in Google-Bengali is “your wife wind movement needed”.
For some reason, this last concept reminds me of a story concerning the late English politician Jeremy Thorpe. According to the obituaries he was, before his famous fall from grace, considered one of the most charismatic of MPs.
Key to his popularity was an ability to remember the names of constituents – a trick he managed by the classic memory-training technique of giving each person a nickname based on word association.
The method backfired once, however, when he struggled to recall the very unusual family name of a voter in Barnstaple. After scouring his mental database, he took a chance, as follows: “So nice to see you again, Mrs Bag.” Whereupon she corrected him that her surname (of Norman origin, I believe) was in fact “Gas”.
I was writing here last week about a Twitter account that scours the web for inadvertent examples of iambic pentameter, then matches them with rhyming others to produce – occasionally, anyway – something greater than the separate originals. But accidental poetry didn’t start with the internet, nor did mistranslation.
For examples worthy of Google Translate, you can go back to the first English-language Bible, compiled by Myles Coverdale in 1535. Coverdale was one of the early-adaptor Protestants, who felt strongly that the Good Book should be accessible in the vernacular, and didn’t let his lack of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew deter him from making it so.
Hence such leaps of imagination as when he was working on the Book of Psalms and came to the section (105: 18) wherein a man named Joseph is captured and put in irons.
In Hebrew versions, it was specified that the irons were around his neck. But in Hebrew, the word for "neck" can also mean "soul". And confronted with this confusion, Coverdale lost the run of himself altogether before declaring, vis-à- vis Joseph, that "the iron entered into his soul".
This sounds like something Google Translate might come up with when trying to explain the condition of a patient just arrived in A&E on a Saturday night. Yet it is undoubtedly poetic and implies something more profound than the prosaic original. So, even though subsequent Bible translations returned to the intended meaning, Coverdale’s image lived on.
Iron in the soul is not something diagnosed by modern doctors, even ones with bad handwriting. But it still sounds convincingly like a metaphysical condition. And among other uses, it has served as an English title for Jean-Paul Sartre's book La mort dans l'âme, which describes the crisis of conscience in occupied France in 1940 and the subsequent transition from apathy to resistance.
@FrankmcnallyIT