Camila Morales, Denise Restum, Emily Ceron, Sydney Roston

ENGL297(0101)
Professor Ania-Bialas
14 March 2018

Ethnographic Research Proposal

Introduction:

This research project will study Evelyn Canabal-Torres, a Spanish professor, as well as Sabina
Trejo, a medical translator, to investigate the importance of bilingual professionals within the
medical field. We will complete interviews with these subjects to learn about their jobs, visit
hospitals to observe any signs of Spanish medical translation, and collect documents that
further describe medical translation. We will specifically focus on the themes of cultural
competency and ethics as they relate to medical translation. The conclusions that we draw from
our research will help us to understand the importance of professional writing, such as
translation in our future careers.

Research Questions:

The objective of this ethnographic study is to bridge the gap between professional writing and
the healthcare profession by specifically addressing the importance of translation in languages,
such as Spanish. We hope to gain insight from two experts, a professor for a Spanish class in a
medical translation course, and a Spanish translator at the University of Maryland Health
Center. Within their respective occupations, we will be asking questions that explore their
responsibilities and how translation plays a role within them.

Firstly, our questions will focus on background knowledge about the subjects, such as what
sparked their interest in the topic or how long they’ve worked as a translator. In terms of the
significance of writing in medicine, we will ask questions such as what level of importance do
they think a translator has with communicating in the medical field, and how important is
understanding various cultures in being able to be an effective translator. Is it important for a
translator to be able to tailor the information based on the patients’ cultures? Finally, to gain an
interpersonal understanding of language from these experts, we will ask how studying
translation and being a translator in the medical field has impacted them and how, as well as in
what ways have they impacted others.

Ultimately, we hope to bring more attention to one of the core elements of communication,
which is language. More specifically, we would like to bring notice to its importance in the field of
medicine. Although, in many of today’s careers, there is an abundance of exposure to diverse
cultures, languages and practices. Therefore, gaining an understanding of language in all
realms of cultures can help to prepare us for its use in the professional world. For most of us,
we hope to apply this research within our future plans in the medical profession, but as a whole,
we also hope to allow it to expand our experience with writing by exploring an unfamiliar topic
such as translation.
Research Subject:

We will have two research subjects for this project so that we can analyze information from two
different perspectives. The first research subject, Evelyn Canabal-Torres is a senior lecturer in
the Spanish department at the University of Maryland. One of the classes that she teaches is
titled “Spanish for the Health Professions”, and it covers the language skills and cultural
competency required for a health professional to treat a Spanish-speaking patient. As a
professor, she compiles resources for students that cover these topics and teaches the material
in class using powerpoints and real-world scenarios. With her permission, we will use her
powerpoint lectures as resources for our project. Throughout our interview, we will gain a better
understanding of her background as a Spanish professor as well as her experience with medical
translation.

Our second research subject, Sabina Trejo is a translator who works for the University of
Maryland Health Center. She is a native Spanish speaker and has worked as a translator for 26
years, seeing 2-3 patients a day. Her work requires only interpretation which means all of the
language translation that she does is out loud, instead of written down. Due to the nature of her
work and the nature of our project, the only information that we will be analyzing from this
research subject is the information given during the interview. Therefore, instead of using
written works as artifacts, this section of our ethnography will focus on the real-world application
of our topic.

With these two perspectives, we can answer our research question from different angles. The
first angle involves understanding what skills are important for someone practicing to be a
medical translator and this will be studied using the artifacts and information from Professor
Canabal-Torres. The second angle involves putting these skills into a real world context, the
day-to-day work of a medical translator, to understand how the skills learned in a medical
translation class get applied to the actual task of medical translation.

Data Collection Methods:

Our focus in bridging the gap between healthcare and professional writing in terms of the
translation of languages relies on the use of semi-structured interviews, field notes, and the
collection of artifacts (i.e. pamphlets, PowerPoints directly from the Professor, and documents
that explain the context of our research question) from the interview participants. We felt that to
achieve a full understanding of the amount of work and focus necessary for the translation of
documents, we needed physical artifacts to be able to compare the variation in sentence
structure, syntax and grammar needed for accurate translation.
Our group made the decision to, in addition to the semi-structured interviews, provide a voice
recording of the interview to avoid misinterpretation and to be able to listen back to ensure full
accuracy of the interviewees statements. We have also decided to provide field notes from
various sites including the UMD Health Center, John Hopkins Hospital, Washington Adventist
Hospital and various local facilities to compare notes on similarities and differences in
translation practices and methodologies. We felt that multiple sources from local agencies would
provide an accurate reading of professional writing for the area.
Given this information and the complications with gathering information from the medical field,
our group has chosen to focus our project around Chapters 9 and 19 from Solving Problems in
Technical Communication. Chapter 9 focuses on the ethical limitations of technical
communication, which contributes to a huge factor in the Medical field. HIPAA laws are explicit
in terms of patient consent and the right to release individuals’ information for public use thus
the understanding of working within ethical guidelines is critical to the success of a technical
communicators work in addition to the success of our project. Chapter 19 focuses primarily
international environments, and for our project we plan to use the section that explains the
importance of understanding the culture of others and the success this understanding provides
technical communicators in the medical field.

Data Analysis:

Our team will be focusing on the communication that occurs between medical translators and
patients. Due to our restricted access of patient medical records, our central approach to
analyzing data is to examine what we assemble from interviews with Professor Canabal-Torres
and Sabina Trejo, field notes, and any additional resources, such as PowerPoints, the subjects
may provide. First, an individual assessment will be made regarding the information that we
collected from each of our subjects. We will subsequently inspect the similarities and differences
observed from the two different perspectives of the professor and the medical translator to help
us further draw conclusions. The method that we will be using to analyze our data is socio
technical graphs, which will allow us to systematically compare interviews and field
observations.

Plan of Work:

The first stage of this project is to collect data, artifacts, and information before Spring Break.
To do this, we will be conducting interviews, collecting field notes, and organizing artifacts. First,
we will interview Sabina Trejo at the University of Maryland Health Center (3/2), and then we will
interview Evelyn Canabal-Torres at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (3/14). After
Spring Break, we will create an outline of our final ethnography report, and then finish a rough
draft of the report (4/18).