Multilingual medicine in the global village
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* Alison Sinclair

As the communities we live in become increasingly cosmopolitan, online resources are being developed to help physicians, nurses, medical translators and others deal with our global village.

Several are multilingual sites. The European Commission has sponsored compilation of the Multilingual Glossary of Technical and Popular Medical Terms in Nine European Languages (**allserv.rug.ac.be/~rvdstich/egloss/wel come.html**). It provides translations of 1830 terms in languages ranging from English, Dutch and German to Portuguese, Spanish and Danish.

Meanwhile, the Medlingua project ([www.medlingua.com](http://www.medlingua.com)) provides matched phrasebooks for a variety of patient encounters for any combination of German, English, Spanish, French and Italian, while the Medical Foreign Language Electronic Phrasebook from the Department of Anesthesia at UCLA ([www.gasnet.org/reference/phrasebook](http://www.gasnet.org/reference/phrasebook)) features useful phrases and sample consent forms for anesthesia in 5 languages, including Hebrew and Polish.

Single-language dictionaries include one for English-Japanese ([www.pmcguam.com/resource/japandic.htm](http://www.pmcguam.com/resource/japandic.htm)), while the Medical American Sign Language Phrasebook ([www.angelfire.com/pa3/ecarpenter/ASLphrasebook.htm](http://www.angelfire.com/pa3/ecarpenter/ASLphrasebook.htm)) has been compiled to help health professionals communicate with deaf patients.

Extensive links to general foreign language dictionaries are supplied by YourDictionary.com ([www.yourdictionary.com](http://www.yourdictionary.com)), the Virtual Pharmacy centre of Martindale's Health Science guide (**www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG /Pharmacy.html**) and 1000Dictionaries.com ([www.1000dictionaries.com](http://www.1000dictionaries.com)), which also collects medical subspecialty dictionaries.

Of course, the most useful phrasebook is always the one close at hand. The Riverside Medical Centre's Peripheral Brain site offers Medical Spanish for Palm ([http://pbrain.hypermart.net/medfiles.html](http://http\|[colon]\|//pbrain.hypermart.net/medfiles.html)). A search for “dictionary” on any of the handheld software distributor sites, PalmGear ([www.palmgear.com](http://www.palmgear.com)), Handango ([www.handango.com](http://www.handango.com)) or Memoware ([www.memoware.com](http://www.memoware.com)) turns up a wealth of downloadable dictionaries, although there is still a paucity of dedicated medical ones.

Finally, discussions about the language issue are beginning in the literature. In the July 2000 issue of the *Online Journal of Issues in Nursing*, Barbara Schloman discusses ways to break through “the foreign language barrier.” Among the new methods being introduced are automated translation systems (**nursingworld .org/ojin/infocol/INFO_4.HTM**). — 

![Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/164/3/394.2/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/164/3/394.2/F1)

Figure.