Found in Translation

When Cultures and Health Care Collide
In late October 1961, a small Red Cross plane landed in Zurich. Twenty-three
Tibetan refugees, a mixture of relief and anxiety shadowing their weatherworn
faces, stepped into a world that was to become their home. Since that arrival
more than half a century ago, Switzerland has provided a new homeland to
thousands more political refugees from Tibet.
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Surely they felt immediately at ease in the snowcapped Swiss mountains and
clear alpine air. But the similarities between the two countries don’t stop there.
Both countries have struggled to maintain an identity in the shadow of
overbearing communist neighbors (the Eastern Bloc in the case of
Switzerland; China in the case of Tibet). This common perspective inspired an
outreach and compassion among the Swiss hosts for their Tibetan guests that
very few other visitors to Switzerland have ever experienced. Indeed, many
Tibetans today have embedded themselves so deeply into their Swiss lives that

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when the Dalai Lama regularly expresses his gratitude for the Swiss
hospitality, he also reminds the exiles to study the Tibetan language.
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Refugee and immigrant groups pop up all over the world, and many of the
places where they are resettled might surprise you. There are sixty thousand
Vietnamese in Czech Republic, ninety-five thousand Iranians in Canada, a
hundred thousand Iraqis in Sweden, two hundred thousand Kurds in Britain,
and nearly seventeen hundred thousand Turkish citizens in Germany, to name a
few. The United States hosts many pockets of refugee communities in
unexpected places—fifty thousand Somalis in Minnesota, thirty-eight thousand
Hmong in Wisconsin, tens of thousands of Iraqis in Detroit, and so on.
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Culture is inextricably tied to language, so interpreters often find the
greatest challenges in conveying terms that require a deep knowledge of their
own or another culture. For example, Hmong in the United States have a
significantly higher likelihood of contracting certain kinds of cancer than
other population groups, but they traditionally have no word for “cancer” or
even “cell.” Medical practitioners and linguists at the University of California
(UC) at Davis have spearheaded an effort to create a Hmong neologism for
cancer, mob khees xaws, but interpreters still have to explain relatively simple
statements by a physician in great length, especially to newly arrived Hmong.
This leads to a variety of problems, including late detection of cancer and the
misunderstanding among Hmong immigrants that cancer is closely linked with
their new home. As one Hmong leader said, “Cancer is so new that we do not
yet have a word for it.”
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In such cases, interpreters often do far more than bridge language gaps.
They enable people from extremely different cultures to understand each other,
especially when those individuals come into contact with each other for the
very first time.