The Linguist

The Linguist 58,4 - Aug/Sept 2019

The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology

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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER The Linguist 19 FEATURES to alert on-call nurses to any complications they are encountering in the field with their patients. The nurses can then help the midwives to triage and make a decision about whether an emergency hospital referral is required. If so, the nurses work to coordinate emergency transport and facilitate receipt of the patient by hospital staff. This arrangement has more than doubled the number of patients delivering within the hospital setting. A lack of native vocabulary It is not enough to simply employ Mayan-speaking staff. The Guatemalan universities and technical schools that train healthcare workers provide instruction only in Spanish, so many of our workers are initially very uncomfortable providing services in Mayan languages, despite being native speakers. This has to do mostly with the fact that Mayan languages lack native words for most of the technical medical vocabulary. This is a commonly encountered problem for minority languages, and one which language revitalisation specialists have spent a lot of time thinking about. The most common solution is to work with a community of language speakers to develop – and then disseminate – neologisms to cover the missing lexical items. This was Maya Health Alliance's early strategy, and we worked to develop many medical words in collaboration with community and academic partners, including Guatemala's Academy of Mayan Language. However, this approach turned out to be very problematic because most of the neologisms were completely unintelligible to patients and ended up creating more communication barriers than they solved. They also tended to reinforce class differences between our providers and their often much poorer patients, with many patients saying things like, "I guess I don't speak Mayan as well as you do." We reevaluated and came up with an unorthodox solution. Essentially, we began encouraging our providers to codeswitch between Spanish and Mayan languages. The instructions go something like this: "If you don't know the word in Mayan, your patients won't either; just use the Spanish word." Our primary goal, after all, is to understand and be understood, and codeswitching freely is a distinguishing characteristic of natural discourse in Mayan languages in all but the highest register of academic or ceremonial speech. This approach has also allowed us to be much more focused and strategic in our use of selected COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT A Wuqu' Kawoq doctor sees a patient in her native language

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