Greetings to the members of the West Japan Medical English Workshop, and thank you to Segawa-san and Maehira-san for the invitation to write this essay.

When we hear the expression “Medical English”, we generally think about language related to human health, but animal health is part of this field too. For example, my work as a pharmaceutical translator has included reports on tissue cross-reactivity between species and ocular coherence tomography findings of age-related macular degeneration in monkeys.

For the last two years, I have also been teaching Medical English classes to second-year veterinary students at the local university. These classes have been a good learning experience for me.  In just the second lesson, I set two homework questions: “What is the function of the cecum in horses?” and “What is the function of the rumen in sheep?”. I thought this would be a good way practice to talking about organ function in English, but I soon learned my mistake. At the end of the class, worried students checked why I was setting two questions with broadly the same answer (fermentation).

 

Medical English lessons do not involve real patients, but active demonstrations with toy animals are a great way to practice speaking English for veterinary students. This toy cow is getting an intra-mammary injection, just minutes after a toy cat was given eye drops. The students are learning English terms for drug administration, and I am learning a lot about animal handling.

 

In another lesson, the toy cow was used to introduce a case study in medical ethics. In that scenario, she had been diagnosed with ocular squamous cell carcinoma. The humane treatment was probably euthanasia. However, the farmer wanted to keep her alive as long as possible to maximize his economic yield. The target language of this lesson was terminology for euthanasia. Veterinarians that work with pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals often describe euthanasia as “putting to sleep”, “slaughter”, and “sacrifice”, respectively. That is a fascinating point for a linguist, but my students were much more focused on the painful ethical dilemmas. After all, they may have to deal with owners requests to kill healthy animals or prolong the suffering of sick ones in their future careers, whereas my most difficult choice is usually just selecting the right word from a dictionary. I learned that using a discussion of euthanasia as a language lesson was very insensitive.

​



 

My second-year veterinary students have taught me two key things. Firstly, empathy for the medical professional is important for the medical translator. My career goal is to help Japanese scientists communicate with the outside world, and that requires a full understanding of their work and not overconcentration on linguistics. Secondly, ethics are important in the work of a medical translator.  Later this year, I will be taking an American Medical Workers Association workshop on ethics, partly because it is a requirement for a certificate, but also because of the way my students taught me to think about ethics.


 

I am happy to say that the toy cow has had better experiences in recent lessons. She has been cured of mastitis and had pregnancy confirmed by ultrasound. In fact, she may be a totally unique patient in Japan; she hears a different diagnosis every week, explained in well-practiced Medical English.