Page 14 - e-Expert Seminar Series: Training the Experts in Medical Translation

Training the Experts in Medical Translation
Training Interpreters
for International Medical Organisations
Lucía Ruiz-Rosendo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
BIODATA
Lucía Ruiz-Rosendo is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, Switzerland, where she is the Director of the Interpreting Department and teaches on the Master’s Degree in Conference Interpreting. She is also a conference interpreter working for international organisations based in Switzerland and an active member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC). She has presented her research at national and international conferences and has produced indexed publications on conference interpreting in healthcare, conference interpreting in international organisations, and interpreting in conflict zones. She is the author of the monograph La interpretación en el ámbito de la medicina (Comares, 2019), and the co-author of Interpreting Conflict. A Comparative Framework (Palgrave, 2021), Interpreter Training in Conflict and Post-conflict Situations (Routledge, 2022) and Towards an Atlas of the History of Interpreting. Voices from around the Word (John Benjamins, 2023).
ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on translation and interpreting in international organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Médecins sans frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders), particularly from an interpreter training perspective. I set out to describe the context in which interpreters work when they are recruited by said organisations to then discuss the challenges and difficulties they face in their practice. I argue that students should be trained so that they are able to confront these challenges in professional scenarios.
In this chapter, I posit that students ought to be exposed to different interpreting modalities. Teaching materials should be designed, adapted and/or selected accordingly so that they allow students to hone relevant skills and develop strategies that enable them to cope with real-life challenges. Interpreters-to-be must develop content-specific research skills that allow them to prepare for highly specialised scenarios that include both organisation-specific and topic-specific terminology and phraseology. Ultimately, students should understand the ethical implications of working for medical humanitarian organisations.
13