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. |
MT TIMES May - Jul 2002 32