BACKGROUND Patient-provider communication, in particular physicians' ability to listen to their patients, and support them in making difficult lifestyle changes, is an essential component of effective diabetes care. Clinical communication around diabetes can be especially challenging when language barriers are present, and may contribute to poor diabetes management and outcomes. Clinicians need...

Static program analysis is a valuable tool for any programming language that people write programs in. The prevalence of scripting languages in the world suggests programming language interpreters are relatively easy to write. Users of these languages lament their inability to analyze their code, therefore programming language analyzers are not easy to write. This thesis investigates a systemat...

BACKGROUND Medical patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) frequently receive health care services of suboptimal quality. METHODS We explored whether clients served with staff interpreters (language-discordant, LDI) receive reproductive health care of lower quality than clients seen by a bilingual clinician (language concordant, LC). We conducted a medical record review of 1,589 repro...

Interpreters are the model of choice for much of the hardware design-verification community. In part, by restricting behavior to a single level of abstraction, interpreters provide a highly desirable conciseness of expression. However, this single-level extent necessarily requires some other means to ‘bridge the gap’ between interpreters in a multi-level hierarchy; i.e., to define the abstracti...

Modular Structural Operational Semantics (MSOS) is a variant of Structural Operational Semantics (SOS). It allows language constructs to be specified independently, such that no reformulation of existing rules in an MSOS specification is required when a language is extended with new constructs and features. Introducing the Prolog MSOS tool, we first recall how to synthesize executable interpret...

It has become more and more customary for a speaker invited to an international conference to hold his speech in a foreign language. Quite inevitably, speakers who do not master the language used often do not manage to present their speech in the most appropriate way from the point of view of linguistic production, thus impeding or costraining comprehension and, therefore, communication. Among ...

Given the growing linguistic diversity in the United States, many practicing psychologists will work with foreign language interpreters. However, few clinicians receive formal training in providing interpreteraided psychological services. By federal law (88th Congress, 1964; PL-88-352), psychologists or their agencies are responsible for providing interpreter services. To maintain a patient-cen...

Non-English-speaking patients in need of psychiatric services are usually evaluated with the help of an interpreter. Discussions with psychiatrists and lay hospital interpreters who had experience in these interviews and content analysis of eight audiotaped interpreter-mediated psychiatric interviews suggested that clinically relevant interpreter-related distortions could lead to misevaluation ...

In a national survey, 82% of U.S. neuropsychologists who offered services to Hispanics self-reported inadequate preparation to work with this population (Echemendia, Harris, Congett, Diaz, & Puente, 1997). The purpose of this paper is to improve the quality and accessibility of neuropsychological services for Hispanic people living in the United States by giving guidance for service delivery, t...

This report is based on the experiences of Navajo interpreters working in a diabetes clinical trial and describes the problems encountered in translating the standard research consent across cultural and linguistic barriers. The interpreters and a Navajo language consultant developed a translation of the standard consent form, maintaining the sequence of information and exactly translating Engl...