Emergency multilingual phrasebook

[pne]

(From scribot_feed; cross-posted to linguaphiles)

An interesting emergency multilingual phrasebook available as PDF files:

The Emergency Multilingual phrasebook, produced and updated by the British Red Cross Society with advice and funding from the Department of Health and endorsed by the British Association for Emergency Medicine (BAEM) is translated into 36 languages. It covers the most common medical questions and terms to help first contact staff communicate with patients who do not speak English and make an initial assessment while an interpreter is contacted

The Japanese uses a couple too many kanji for my taste—for example, they always use 何時 to translate "when", which I always want to read "nanji" and interpret as "at what hour" rather than reading it "itsu" and interpreting it as generic "when" (which can include a date).

They also have a 何ら in one place, which isn't a word I've come across. EDICT has readings "nanira" and "nanra" for it but I wonder whether they meant 幾ら "ikura" (which I would have written in kana, probably).

I was also interested by their translation of "I have to XYZ", which seems to be "Please cause XYZ to happen" (XYZをさせて下さい).

Comments

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

What a good idea -- that would be useful in a hospital in just about any country. It might not be a bad idea, for traveling, to print out one in your native language and in the language of the country you're visiting... If nothing else, you can always point.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes—after all, as I understand it, the thing is meant to be used for pointing to phrases.

After all, you can't expect your random British nurse to be able to read Amharic well enough to read the question to the patient; it relies in the numbering so she finds out she wants to ask question #32 and points to #32 on the Amharic version and has the patient read it.

So yes, that would work even if the patient is English and the nurse is Amharic, because I'm in Ethiopia, rather than the other way around.