Usually we’re concerned with the vicissitudes of communicating across language barriers. But here’s another way to think about how you’re interacting with patients. Recently the New York Times explored a few of the unspoken pitfalls by which patients get a message far removed from your intentions.

For instance, are the robes you offer uncomfortable and unintentionally revealing? Is the exam room freezing? Is the waiting room TV blaring a never-ending litany of disturbing news? Do the stirrups in a gyn exam room face the door? In short, have you created a physical  environment in which patients feel respected or devalued?

For a more detailed analysis of the inadvertent non-verbal messages you may be sending, see How Would You Redesign Your Doctor’s Office: The way clinics make patients feel is an important part of their care.

Here’s a new podcast that opens a window into Hmong culture in America. Hmonglish is hosted by Yia Vang — a James Beard-nominated chef — and Gia Vang, a former anchor at KARE-11.

Interviewed recently by MPR Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer, the podcasters describe some of the tribulations of being school kids, interpreters and cultural navigators while coming up in Minnesota.

Here’s Yia Vang on searching for the Hmonglish word in English that doesn’t exist in Hmong: “The word “Hmonglish” is this idea that as Hmong kids growing up, we had to speak Hmong to our parents but then there were words and concepts that we just didn’t understand. So for example, how do you say computer in Hmong, there’s no word for computer, or if there is, it’s a long phrase, or even like the word Netflix. There’s no way of explaining what Netflix is like, Netflix is actually just part of the Hmong language. Now, YouTube is part of the Hmong language.

“We jokingly just call that ‘Oh, that’s Hmonglish.’ It’s also the way that this third culture works. You have the Hmong culture and then you have the western culture. And then, people like me and Gia, we kind of fall in that middle where we straddle both cultures.”

Subscribe to the podcast here.

In a health care environment it’s not the same as offering in-person interpretation, but recent additions to the languages offered by Google Translate help make the world a smaller place.

In ‘Allinllachu.’ Google Translate Adds Quechua to Its Platform, the New York Times explains how Google has added Quechua, an indigenous tongue spoken by an estimated eight to ten million people in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, to its growing library of translated languages.

Quechua, the Times observes, is among 24 languages, spoken by an estimated 300 million people worldwide, added by Google to its translation service in the past month. Heavily represented in this new cache are mostly oral languages spoken by Indigenous or minority populations. Quechua is one example; another is Lingala, spoken by 45 million Central Africans.

Kaypi qhawaykuy. (That’s check it out here, in Quechua.)

Generally people think of interpretation and translation as a way to solve problems. Here’s a story from St. Paul that proves just the opposite can be true as well.

In Dialect dispute has St. Paul Hmong group calling for Dai Thao to quit; he wants FBI probe, St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Fred Melo describes a language dispute within the Hmong community over an inscription in Hmong near a Chinese garden pavilion at Lake Phalen.

The flare up is a dialect issue between speakers of Green Hmong and White Hmong, who disagree over whether the correct spelling of what is recognized in English as “Hmong,” should on the stone inscription be “Hmoob” in White Hmong, or “Moob” in Green Hmong.

St. Paul City Councilman Dai Thao stepped into the fight by asking on Facebook why the Green dialect version appeared on the stone. For his trouble he was met with protestors outside city hall who demanded his resignation. Thao said that he had been physically threatened for expressing his opinion, and asked for an FBI investigation.

As if all this weren’t enough, the story is entwined with a Chinese sister city, the cartoonist Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Lucy, a Chinese American friendship society, plus Hmong ex-military men seeking a return to a Hmong republic to be established somewhere in South East Asia. Needless to say, the piece is well worth a read for anyone who has ever had a document translated into Hmong.

Having others understand the language you speak is one thing, but having your language survive in the face of globalization is another. That’s the subject that James Griffith takes on in his book, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language.

Griffith reports on the battles to keep minority languages from going extinct in Wales, Hawaii, southern China, Hong Kong and indigenous America.

You’ll get insight here on how technology both hurts and helps in the fight against minority language extinction. Griffiths explains how languages hang on, the costs when they don’t, and how indigenous tongues can be walked back from the ledge of permanent loss.

The book is garnering reviews in, among other publications, the New Yorker and the LA Review of Books, which called Speak Not “a stimulating work on the politics of language.”

Here’s another find via the excellent online immigrant/refugee news source, Sahan Journal. In this piece — After having a daughter, Reona Htoo couldn’t find children’s books in the Karen language. So she wrote one herself— St. Paul resident Htoo translates her love of the outdoors, and her effort to pass it on to her 22-month-old daughter, into a picture book aimed at kids one to three years old.

The book, My Little Legs, is a addition to what is otherwise a scant collection of books in Karen. The story notes that there are only 32 Karen-language books available in US libraries. Three of them are published by the St. Paul Public Library.

The story beneath My Little Legs is the discomfort people of color frequently feel in parks and other outdoor spaces. While people of color make up 20 percent of the Minnesota population, they comprise about five percent of state park visitors. See an examination of this issue, and efforts to address it, in a Sahan Journal article here.

Buy a copy of My Little Legs direct from Htoo by contacting her at NawHaChu@gmail.com.