Camila Morales, Denise Restum, Emily Ceron, Sydney Roston

ENGL297: Introduction to Professional Writing

Ethnographic Research Project Proposal

Ethnographic Research Proposal

Introduction:

This research project will study Subject 1, a Spanish professor, as well as Subject 2, a medical translator,
to investigate the importance of bilingual professionals within the medical field. We will complete
interviews with these subjects to learn about their jobs, visit hospitals to observe any signs of Spanish
medical translation, and collect documents that further describe medical translation. We will specifically
focus on the themes of cultural competency and ethics as they relate to medical translation. The
conclusions that we draw from our research will help us to understand the importance of professional
writing, such as translation in our future careers.

Research Questions:

The objective of this ethnographic study is to bridge the gap between professional writing and the
healthcare profession by specifically addressing the importance of translation in languages, such as
Spanish. We hope to gain insight from two experts, a professor for a Spanish class in a medical translation
course, and a Spanish translator at the University of Maryland Health Center. Within their respective
occupations, we will be asking questions that explore their responsibilities and how translation plays a
role within them.

Firstly, our questions will focus on background knowledge about the subjects, such as what sparked their
interest in the topic or how long they’ve worked as a translator. In terms of the significance of writing in
medicine, we will ask questions such as what level of importance do they think a translator has with
communicating in the medical field, and how important is understanding various cultures in being able to
be an effective translator. Is it important for a translator to be able to tailor the information based on the
patients’ cultures? Finally, to gain an interpersonal understanding of language from these experts, we will
ask how studying translation and being a translator in the medical field has impacted them and how, as
well as in what ways have they impacted others.

Ultimately, we hope to bring more attention to one of the core elements of communication, which is
language. More specifically, we would like to bring notice to its importance in the field of medicine.
Although, in many of today’s careers, there is an abundance of exposure to diverse cultures, languages
and practices. Therefore, gaining an understanding of language in all realms of cultures can help to
prepare us for its use in the professional world. For most of us, we hope to apply this research within our
future plans in the medical profession, but as a whole, we also hope to allow it to expand our experience
with writing by exploring an unfamiliar topic such as translation.

Research Subject:
We will have two research subjects for this project so that we can analyze information from two different
perspectives. The first research subject, Subject 1 is a senior lecturer in the Spanish department at the
University of Maryland. One of the classes that she teaches is titled “Spanish for the Health Professions”,
and it covers the language skills and cultural competency required for a health professional to treat a
Spanish-speaking patient. As a professor, she compiles resources for students that cover these topics and
teaches the material in class using PowerPoints and real-world scenarios. With her permission, we will
use her PowerPoint lectures as resources for our project. Throughout our interview, we will gain a better
understanding of her background as a Spanish professor as well as her experience with medical
translation.

Our second research subject, Subject 2 is a translator who works for the University of Maryland Health
Center. She is a native Spanish speaker and has worked as a translator for 26 years, seeing 2-3 patients a
day. Her work requires only interpretation which means all of the language translation that she does is
out loud, instead of written down. Due to the nature of her work and the nature of our project, the only
information that we will be analyzing from this research subject is the information given during the
interview. Therefore, instead of using written works as artifacts, this section of our ethnography will
focus on the real-world application of our topic.

With these two perspectives, we can answer our research question from different angles. The first angle
involves understanding what skills are important for someone practicing to be a medical translator and
this will be studied using the artifacts and information from Subject 1. The second angle involves putting
these skills into a real-world context, the day-to-day work of a medical translator, to understand how the
skills learned in a medical translation class get applied to the actual task of medical translation.

Data Collection Methods:

Our focus in bridging the gap between healthcare and professional writing in terms of the translation of
languages relies on the use of semi-structured interviews, field notes, and the collection of artifacts (i.e.
pamphlets, PowerPoints directly from the Professor, and documents that explain the context of our
research question) from the interview participants. We felt that to achieve a full understanding of the
amount of work and focus necessary for the translation of documents, we needed physical artifacts to be
able to compare the variation in sentence structure, syntax and grammar needed for accurate translation.
Our group made the decision to, in addition to the semi-structured interviews, provide a voice recording
of the interview to avoid misinterpretation and to be able to listen back to ensure full accuracy of the
interviewees statements. We have also decided to provide field notes from various sites including the
UMD Health Center, John Hopkins Hospital, Washington Adventist Hospital and various local facilities
to compare notes on similarities and differences in translation practices and methodologies. We felt that
multiple sources from local agencies would provide an accurate reading of professional writing for the
area.

Given this information and the complications with gathering information from the medical field, our
group has chosen to focus our project around Chapters 9 and 19 from Solving Problems in Technical
Communication. Chapter 9 focuses on the ethical limitations of technical communication, which
contributes to a huge factor in the Medical field. HIPAA laws are explicit in terms of patient consent and
the right to release individuals’ information for public use thus the understanding of working within
ethical guidelines is critical to the success of a technical communicators work in addition to the success of
our project. Chapter 19 focuses primarily international environments, and for our project we plan to use
the section that explains the importance of understanding the culture of others and the success this
understanding provides technical communicators in the medical field.

Data Analysis:

Our team will be focusing on the communication that occurs between medical translators and patients.
Due to our restricted access of patient medical records, our central approach to analyzing data is to
examine what we assemble from interviews with Subject 1 and Subject 2, field notes, and any additional
resources, such as PowerPoints, the subjects may provide. First, an individual assessment will be made
regarding the information that we collected from each of our subjects. We will subsequently inspect the
similarities and differences observed from the two different perspectives of the professor and the medical
translator to help us further draw conclusions. The method that we will be using to analyze our data is
socio technical graphs, which will allow us to systematically compare interviews and field observations.

Plan of Work:

The first stage of this project is to collect data, artifacts, and information before Spring Break. To do this,
we will be conducting interviews, collecting field notes, and organizing artifacts. First, we will interview
Subject 2 at the University of Maryland Health Center (3/2), and then we will interview Subject 1 at the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese (3/14). After Spring Break, we will create an outline of our final
ethnography report, and then finish a rough draft of the report (4/18).