The patient had just undergone a cesarean section, and now was struggling to put words to her pain in her native Taiwanese. The physician making rounds, Natasha Mehandru, was used to communicating with patients who didn’t speak English as a first language at her county hospital in Phoenix. But this time, calling in an interpreter by phone wasn’t working.
“The service was not really good,” she said — and soon, she realized the patient and the interpreter weren’t even speaking the same dialect. “It was difficult to communicate, even with the interpreter.”
So Mehandru turned to a familiar tool: Google Translate. Typing translations back and forth — Taiwanese to English, English to Taiwanese — she and the patient slowly came to an understanding with the help of the interpreter still on the line. Her pain wasn’t from the C-section, in her abdomen, but from a separate and long-standing issue, lower in her body. “That changed how I managed her that day,” said Mehandru, who was at the time a gynecological resident and is now a surgeon at Kaiser San Jose Medical Center. With the help of the machine translation tool, “we changed around medications, and then over the course of a couple days she ended up feeling better.”
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