医学英語のインタビュ

Melinda Hull: I would like to start by asking you if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you personally do.

Takayuki Oshimi: My name is Takayuki Oshimi. I am a medical doctor and I am also an assistant professor at Nihon University School of Medicine. And I teach English for Medical Purposes there. English for Medical Purposes includes writing for academic purposes, and communicating with non-Japanese patients, and how to make oral presentations in English. And how to communicate with editors or reviewers. And I am also involved in training health care interpreters as a board member of the Japan Association for Health Care Interpreting in Japanese and English, which is a quite long name. And this is abbreviated to JE. We call it JE. And so I am involved in establishing a training program for health care interpreters between Japanese and English. My research interest is also about making a curriculum or training program for medical or health care providers about cultural competency at health care settings.

Hull: Well now your English is obviously very good. So could you tell us how it got so good and what was the impetus behind you becoming interested in this specific field of medicine?

Oshimi: How I learned my English? Basically I learned English in Japan. When I was a high school student, English was my favorite subject. So at that time, I wanted to work, for example, at WHO or international organizations, so I studied at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and my major was international relations. And I learned English there. And after studying there, I decided to become a doctor, because health or life were very interesting to me at that time. When I studied medicine at Ashikawa Medical College, even at that time, English was my passion, and language and how to communicate with people from other countries was also quite interesting to me. So I decided to become an expert of English for medical purposes in this field. And when I traveled in Canada, I met several Japanese populations there, and I understood that even Japanese people who are quite good in their English, they could not communicate well with health care providers there. For example, a middle-aged man, he did not understand what operation he had had. Yeah it was quite amazing. His English was very good, so I was very interested in health care interpreting which is interpreting for health care providers and a patient who does not speak the same language as the health care provider.

Hull: I know when I first came to Japan, one of the first things that I did was ensure that I had a doctor who I could communicate with in English. And my objective of living in Japan was to learn the language, however I knew that it was not to learn the language when I was sick. I wanted to make sure that I had a good doctor that I could communicate with. So I got a doctor and a dentist that I could communicate with in English. Now that's not all that hard to do for native English speakers in Japan. The opposite for Japanese going overseas has got to be much much more challenging. We are going to be talking mainly about the market or the situation in Japan, but maybe as end to this segment of our interview, you could tell us a little bit about what the conditions are for Japanese going overseas and how many health care interpreters are there overseas, if any?

Oshimi: Okay, in a country with immigrant policy such as the United States or Australia, it is compulsory for the government or hospitals to provide language services. So especially, for example, like in the United States, there are many Spanish-English health care interpreters. But the Japanese population is not so large, even in Australia or in the United States. And some Japanese people living there, they are quite fluent in English, so Japanese health care interpreters are not so many, even in English-speaking countries. So Japanese health care interpreting is basically not a profession, even in Australia or in the United States because they have fewer patients, so they have fewer job opportunities, so they cannot live on just health care interpreting duties.

Hull: Well I would like to thank you for talking with us today, and this is the end of our first segment. And then in our second segment, we will talk exactly about what is a health care interpreter, how you become one and all kinds of other stuff about it. Thank you