Ana Bolaños – On The Front Lines Of Language

NCM, Julie Johnson, Posted: Oct 01, 2003

OAKLAND, CA. -- The trickiest part about interpreting for patients who don’t speak English is when a wife brings her husband along to translate, says Ana Bolaños. At 51, Bolaños has spent over a decade interpreting for Spanish-language patients at Oakland’s Highland Hospital.

“Usually, family members are bad translators – especially if they are men who are translating for a woman,” Bolaños says. “They keep many things to themselves. They think, ‘If I know she doesn’t have to know.’ So I have to push them. I’ll tell a husband something and he’ll say one word to the patient and then I have to say to him, ‘Please tell her everything that I said, because I know you didn’t.’”

Bolaños has been on the front lines of medical emergencies ever since she finished medical school in El Salvador in 1980. Working as a general practitioner during El Salvador’s brutal civil war she tended many patients who were victims of the violence. She herself had to flee when her brother-in-law was beaten within an inch of his life for his involvement in the agrarian reform movement. Her husband Arnoldo, also a doctor, was working that night when his brother was brought into the emergency room. Arnoldo called Bolaños, and the two treated him together. Shortly after, they began receiving death threats and decided they had to leave their family and El Salvador behind.

When Bolaños and her husband immigrated to California in 1989, both planned to seek accreditation to continue their careers as physicians. But after joining a volunteer team at Highland to learn the ropes of the U.S. medical system, she found the hospital’s biggest need was not for doctors but for interpreters.

“I thought we’d be doing the grunt work, like transporting patients, carrying tubes, delivering samples to the labs. Instead, they were using us to translate for Spanish-speaking patients.”

At the time, Highland, like most hospitals in California, had only one full time interpreter in Spanish to treat a rapidly growing population of immigrants from Mexico as well as Central and South America. After six months of volunteering, both she and her husband were hired as on-call interpreters. In 1990, Arnoldo left the medical field to become a Tae Kwan Do instructor. Ana was hired as a permanent OB/GYN and pediatrics interpreter and has worked there ever since.

“When I was a doctor, I helped people,” Bolaños says. “Today, I still help people. The patients are so grateful – not only to the doctor but to the interpreter because it’s the language that makes them feel comfortable.”

Interpreter departments in hospitals are fairly new, though according to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, every patient who can’t speak English has a right to a professional health care interpreter. But health care interpreting is only recently gaining ground as a profession, and with California residents now speaking over 230 different languages, the demand far outstrips resources.

Ana remembers when a patient who spoke only Mayan brought her husband along to translate into Spanish. “The patient is telling the husband in Mayan, the husband is telling me in Spanish and I’m telling the nurse in English,” Bolaños recalls. Inevitably, important information gets lost in the process.

Another problem, Bolaños says, is that the field is relatively new. Statistics won’t necessarily show that a Mayan or Hmong interpreter is needed, and people who have language skills don’t realize the tremendous opportunities for serving their communities as health care interpreters. Most important, though, is that patients aren’t aware of their rights to language access services.

Bolaños is a pioneer for both the health care field she’s dedicated her life to serving and to the thousands of patients she’s served who, without her services, would lose the key to good health care: communications.

Bolaños has seen her role as an interpreter transform into a department covering upwards of 29 languages. She is also among those who have dedicated their careers to the thousands of people who, without their services, would lose the key to good health care: communications.


Page 1 of 1

Printable Version Return to Normal Version Send Page to Friend Subscribe to NAM Newsletters