Kids for Real: Child Interpreters

In hospitals across the state, children are often asked to translate complex and sometimes embarrassing medical information to their parents or family members.

More foreign languages — many obscure — are spoken in California than in any other state in the country. This linguistic diversity poses an especially daunting challenge to doctors and other medical personnel who must relate matters of life and death to non-English speaking patients or family members.

In some cases, the patient’s child — or, even, the child patient — is asked to explain procedures and prognoses to a non-English speaking parent or relative.

In the following report, we meet two children — Maria, age 10 and her brother, Sikandar, 12 — who both suffer from the same serious illness. We follow them on a doctor’s visit and see what it’s like to be confused about their condition and about the strange, medical terminology they have to translate to their mother.

The first installment of a three-part series, “Kids for Real.” An earlier version of this story first aired September 16, 2005.