I am reading about dyspnea assessment tools, and the researchers want to develop instruments that are valid and responsive across nations and cultures. They talked about a a major component of a multinational tool being "linguistic validation," which they said can take months. The process, they said, includes translations forward and back, a review by clinicians, patient testing, and harmonization across participating countries.

Has anyone ever worked with this? It seems quite interesting to me.

For the cultural part, they were talking about questions like, "shoveling snow" not being useful in Sydney or "mowing the lawn" not being useful in Tokyo.

I guess no one has heard of this. I expect this medical linguistics, or whatever they will call it, will become popular in the years to come. Health care has become global, and we routinely compare patient symptoms, responses, etc., across languages and cultures. It just makes sense.

It's fun talking to myself.

I saw a book today ("How Doctors Think"), and while I only skimmed it, I could see that much of it was about important language, and understanding the meaning, is in medicine. This author, a physician, was saying that technology and advances in medicine have actually decreased the communication part of medicine. Definitely I think that is true. When you think about it, both the use of words, and their interpretation, can save lives! There were some excellent cases in the book on just that point.

Isn't the reason why species names are all in Latin to avoid translation problems?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
It's fun talking to myself.

Does it require any linguistic validation?