Translating Cultural References in Patient Information Leaflets: Translators versus Doctors

Patient information leaflets (PILs) accompany medications and contain information about dosage, contraindications, etc. These leaflets that are "the most important source of information about a drug that patients have access to" (Bjerrum & Foged, 2003, p. 58) aim at communicating health-related information to the general public (Nisbeth Jensen, 2015). In different countries, PILs are usually results of translation. For example, on the European Union (EU), PILs that are authorized through Centralised Procedure (CP) must be translated into all EU languages (European Parliament and of the Council, 2001). Studies showed that PILs are mainly translated by pharmacists (Askehave & Zethsen, 2002; Nisbeth Jensen, 2013). As PILs are produced and translated for culturally and linguistically diverse populations, the present study intended to compare doctors and professional translators’ choices when translating Cultural References (CR) in PILs from English to Persian. Based on a corpus of 5 English PILs authorized through CP, 2 groups of 5 doctors and 5 professional translators were asked to translate a selection of sentences containing CR into Persian. Based on a defined framework, the translations were analyzed against their source texts for comparison. Findings showed that the doctors and professional translators opt for similar choices when translating CR in PILs. The study could help health professionals, policy makers, pharmaceutical companies, and translators to have better understanding of cultural issues in health communication specifically PILs considering that "in interlinguistic healthcare communication there are cultural elements whose understanding is essential for health decisions and treatment" (Tercedor-Sánchez & López-Rodríguez, 2012, p. 248).