什么？ oops, uh, say again?

As our school's International Department is quite large, it's not uncommon to hear four or more languages being spoken in a hallway or even a single exam room at the hospital. However, this week probably tops them all with the arrival of visiting docs from Italy who speak extremely limited English at best. To deal with the communication difficulties caused by the aforementioned situation, I and fellow student from Mexico have been solicited to translate for the doctors because Spanish and Italian are similar.

Similar, yes; the same, no. We speak Spanish to them (well, I mumble through forgotten Spanish with Chinese words slipped in) and they speak Italian back to us. Here's a verbatim excerpt from today's conversations:

Francesca: ...........

(a long Italian/Spanish/English sentence after which I finally gather that she is asking me what are ashi points)

Me: 好好, los puntos de 阿是son muy importantes. Para usar los, 首先, oops sorry chinese, primero es necessario applicar la presion, 压力, pressure, presione? sure, por la area donde el paciente tiene dolor. 然后, uh uh, then....

And you get the point. I search around in my tiny head for fragments of a past medical Spanish class and attempt to banish my Chinese responses and sentence connectors. Hopefully we'll be able to help these docs figure out exactly what they're learning. The docs are sweet as can be, and I actually look forward to this language madness in the clinic.

So whether you speak Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Tagolog, English, Spanish, or now even Italian, you're welcome to our clinic and are even guaranteed a translator for your language needs. Pretty impressive I'd say, and highly entertaining.