Walking like an Indian?

 

The Tale of the Glorious Hunchback

Cheryl J. Blake

 

I believe that a hunchback can be considered glorious in India.  "The patient was attacked by a glorious hunchback while shopping for groceries."  This could be a plausible statement.  The word hunchback is certainly used more in India than the word hatchback is.  Even though there are hatchback cars in India, they aren't called that, so the term hatchback was a foreign one.  Here's what was actually dictated, "Gloria was putting her groceries in her hatchback when the hatch fell on her." 

 

I call this kind of blank filling "fitting a square peg in a round hole."  It's making something fit that doesn't exactly, but sort of fits syllabically.  Let's take this example.  The patient was stuck by the side of the road fixing the water pump on his waterhole.  Why on earth would a patient fix a water pump on a waterhole by the side of the road?  He wouldn't.  He would, however, be fixing the water pump on his motorhome.  Listen to the sounds:  wa-ter-hole... mo-tor-home - it fits syllabically.  It was the only thing that sounded remotely like anything in the transcriptionist's realm of experience that would work, so waterhole was chosen.

 

Another example of an interpolation error would be:  "The patient's mother said he suffered a seizure while shopping and chasing pennies."  Actually, "The patient's mother said he suffered a seizure while shopping at

J. C. Penneys."  The MT cannot know the name of every single store in the US, although our reference material available on the Web makes it easier to look things like this up.  You'd have to know it was a store first, though.

How do we pass on a lifetime of experiences to our Indian partners?  Through experience and feedback, obviously.  Through exposure.  It is no less odd for me to read in an Indian English language newspaper that "Dacoits abscond with reliquary worth Rs 1 crore".  There are maybe three words I truly understand in this sentence, but it is in English.  Not American English, that's for certain, but still English.  What's a Dacoit?  (a bandit) What on earth are Rs 1 crore?  (10 million rupees).  I'm sure you get my point.  Every Indian knows what these words mean, but I had to learn them by asking.


MT TIMES May - Jul 2002                                                                                                                                     32