Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Spanish translation of prescription med instructions can be deadly!

I didn't realize most pharmacies use COMPUTER translation programs to translated Rx directions. Not a good idea. Also, using a mix of Spanish and English (Spanglish) results in some inadvertent problems:

From Doctorslounge.com:

The use of "Spanglish" also created some potentially dangerous situations. For example, the word "once" means "eleven" in Spanish. "You mean to say 'once,' as in 'take once a day,' and a Spanish-speaking person could interpret that to mean 'eleven,'" Sharif said. Such a mistake could result in an overdose.


read more here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree 100% that prescriptions should be translated by a person, but that just isn't possible all the time. Few companies have a full-time translator on staff, so they have to depend on online translators. The only advice I would have is to at least compare a few translations if you are going to use online translators at all. I do a few translations for friends and small businesses and even though I am pretty confident in my own translation abilities, I like to run both the English and Spanish through the spanish translation tool from SpanishDict.com. It gives you the translations from 3 different translators so you can compare the results and find the one that sounds best. If I am still not sure, I just put it into the forum and the super friendly users correct it for me for free.

M.akrmsaim12812 said...

on line translation is sometime very good to use but some time they have little option