Language barriers make communication in a clinical setting somewhat of a challenge. One year I inadvertently invited a teenage girl to my hotel room, because I used the wrong tense of a verb. Another year I said something else that was much worse. We have been very fortunate on this year’s medical campaign to have several native speakers as translators. They have worked very hard to assist the dentists and the doctors. I found out tonight that important life issues don’t have to be lost in translation.

A young couple named Othiniel and Paloma Guiterriez helped us today at the clinic. They later joined us for dinner this evening at a Chihuahua restaurant. I was determined to practice my Spanish with them. I thought a conversation about our children would be fairly simple. I told them that I had three boys. I shared the ages of the boys. I told them in Spanish that Jan talks incessantly and of course was corrected immediately by my colleagues. And then he Othiniel said something I thought was rather odd.

Othiniel told me in Spanish that his son just went to sleep. I wondered why that was significant. He went to sleep. Most children do that every night. The meaning was lost in translation until he used the word muerto. I recognized that as the Spanish word for die. I quickly put it together. Their child died from SIDS.
I used the English phrase crib death and he recognized it immediately. My Spanish vocabulary is not advanced enough to convey verbally what I wanted to say to both of them, so I relied almost exclusively on nonverbal communication.
I found that very little is lost in translation when nonverbal cues are used to get something important across. They could sense how I felt about their loss.

I have used my poor Spanish skills as an excuse in the past for not having meaningful conversations with people when I am in Mexico. I refuse to do that anymore. When I fail to try, I lose out on the opportunity to hear someone’s story. Friendships remain shallow until we are willing to listen critically to the other person’s story. The conversation with Paloma and Othiniel continued tonight and we discovered we had quite a few things in common. I listened intently, sought language assistance a few times, and enjoyed the conversation immediately. There were times when neither of us could find the correct words in our native language, but it is awful difficult for love and mutual respect to be lost in translation.