Frankfort firm offers interpreters for hospital visits

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Sometimes it’s hard enough trying to understand what a doctor or other health care provider is telling you.

Now imagine if English were a foreign language to you.

Helping to bridge that gap is a Frankfort company, Metaphrasis Language and Cultural Solutions.

Founded by Elizabeth Colon in November 2007, the company contracts with more than 300 freelance interpreters and translators. The interpreters work mainly at hospitals, aiding non-English-speaking patients.

Colon’s clients include Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Resurrection Hospital, Loyola Medical Center and Advocate Health Care hospitals, including Trinity on Chicago’s South Side and Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

In another area, the company recently was called upon by Chicago mayoral candidate Gery Chico to translate his website to Polish and Chinese, Colon said.

Metaphrasis also offers consulting services to businesses to “help them connect, collaborate and communicate with clients from other cultures,” she said.

The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts increased demand over the next several years for interpreters — who work with spoken words — and translators, who convert written words from one language to another. Colon said she speaks to area high school students about the field.

“It’s a profession that’s growing tremendously,” she said.

Last year, Metaphrasis provided nearly 20,000 hours of interpreting and translation services, Colon said.

Metaphrasis recently opened a training center in Chicago, and interpreters and translators who want to work for the company undergo training as well as an unpaid internship in a hospital, Colon said.

Working in health care, interpreters need some proficiency in medical terminology, she said.

“You may have to be at the bedside of someone who is going to die, and may have to communicate bad news to family members of a patient,” Colon said. “You are part of the health care team because you are the voice of that patient.”

At the same time, interpreters are expected to remain somewhat stoic and detached and not get overly emotional.

“They have to be neutral, but not robotic,” she said.

Before starting her own company, Colon was director of the nonprofit Cross-Cultural Interpreting Services in Chicago. She said she wanted to pursue a career in the field partly because her parents’ primary language was Spanish and they spoke very little English.

Neither parent attended school beyond second grade, and after her father died, Colon’s mother was responsible for raising her and her five siblings.

“I’m not doing this because I want to be a Fortune 500 company,” Colon said. “I’m very passionate about it.”

Metaphrasis offers face-to-face interpreting in 30 languages and translation services in more than 60 languages. Spanish, Arabic and Polish are, respectively, the languages the company’s interpreters and translators most often work with, Colon said.

What can be tricky, she said, is working with dialects.

“All people in China speak Chinese, but there can be differences in dialects between Cantonese and Mandarin,” she said. “It’s the same with Spanish-speaking people, depending on whether they’re Spanish, Argentinian, Puerto Rican or Mexican.”

Colon is state representative for the International Medical Interpreters Association and a board member for the Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters.

Colon also recently was selected to serve as board chairman of the Voice of Love project, a volunteer effort to provide interpreter training programs to assist victims of torture and sexual abuse.

The training programs — scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012 — will be made available at no charge to agencies that work with torture and abuse victims.