by Marika Azzopardi

For one so young, Robert Cachia is a highly dynamic person. Entering his fifth year as a medical student at the University of Malta, he is intensely involved in the Malta Medical Students’ Association (MMSA) and has held a position in the executive board twice, once as the Medical Education Officer and currently as the President of the association.

“One of my responsibilities as the Medical Education Officer was to create opportunities for medical students in order to fill in any gaps existing within the medical curriculum. One such opportunity was a suturing workshop which attracted a good number of students with great enthusiasm.”

Robert recently turned an idea into a tangible reality when he thought of creating a pocket-size medical translator – The MMSA Medical Language Translator | Traduttur tal-Lingwaġġ Mediku. The publication, issued last April by the MMSA is a 1000+ word book that translates medical terms from Maltese to English and vice versa. Why was it created?

“As a clinical student I started experiencing situations where doctors and patients were having communication problems due to a language barrier. I personally speak Maltese at home but many Maltese students at University are English-speaking and have difficulty keeping up a conversation in proper Maltese.  Moreover we now have many foreign students who come to Malta and have to deal with the Maltese/English dual terminology situation. Difficulties arise when speaking to Maltese people who do not understand or speak English or use old Maltese terms and phrases, especially the elderly who make up a great majority of the hospital population. For instance, what would you call a ‘leak’ in Maltese? Or how would you correctly translate the word into English? Then again, how do you differentiate between ‘minfes’ and ‘minħar’? In fact you don’t, if you know that they both refer to ‘nostril’.”

Together with fellow students, he started working spontaneously on the project by forming a quick list of basic words which turn up to be difficult to translate in everyday medical practice. The quick list started from around 100 words and quickly expanded as he researched a contemporary Maltese dictionary in tandem with a contemporary English dictionary. The end result was a total of over one thousand translated words. Each translation is presented in two ways where possible, in order to facilitate communication in different scenarios i.e. it provides layman’s terms when communicating with patients and also provides scientific terms when writing scientific articles and journals.

During the process of this dictionary’s creation, Robert found invaluable help from Professor Manwel Mifsud, Dr Michael Spagnol and Mr Josef Trapani from the Department of Maltese of the University of Malta. “We had plenty of support from the Department of Maltese with great enthusiasm for the finished product which will also be of assistance to Maltese language students, translators and interpreters.” Yes of course, the Medical Language Translator promises to be handy mostly to doctors (includingforeign trainees), pharmacists, as well as students of these professions and other healthcare professionals, who sometimes have to struggle for that one unique word which makes things that much clearer especially for patients.

Robert is now awaiting the coming academic year to further promote this translator book. He explains how he has experienced varied situations where medical translation is vital. This has been especially so in his travels during which he attended various student exchanges experienced in Poland, Netherlands and Austria as well as several international conferences experienced in Denmark, India, Ghana and Chile. “I attend these International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA) conferences with great enthusiasm because I learn so much. During the most recent one in Chile there were 118 member organisations from 110 different countries gathering a total of some 1000 delegates. It is obvious that language differences exist in such a diverse accumulation of people; however finding strident language differences on such a tiny island as Malta is thoroughly fascinating. Discovering so many Maltese words of which I had never known the existence of was also a learning experience for me.”