Interpreters flourish as medical tourism booms

Chennai: It is 2.15 pm on a week day. Sitting at the international patients’ service centre of a corporate hospital in the city, Kalyan M.V. speaks in Arabic over the phone. “A patient enquires about an appointment with a specialist here. Every day, I attend to numerous calls from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Oman,” says Kalyan.

How did Kalyan take up this translation job? He immediately corrects us, “It’s not a translation job. I’m an interpreter. We do everything from making arrangements for international patients to visit Chennai, providing them a place to stay here and preparing food that is tailored to their taste,” says the interpreter at Apollo Hospitals who knows nine languages, including Arabic and Urdu. Now he is learning Swahili.

With the state being a preferred choice for international patients, it has opened job opportunities for many like Kalyan who can communicate the needs of international patients to doctors and vice versa. At the medical tourism conference held last year, experts said that every year, Tamil Nadu has been drawing an average of 6.65 lakh medical tourists.

When Mohamed Hassan, 30, was looking for business opportunities between the Gulf and Tamil Nadu, he decided to make use of the flourishing medical tourism. “I was brought up in the Gulf and know exactly what they want from the city they come to for treatment. It’s more than three years now since I started guiding Arabs. Not all Arabs have similar accents, and when you speak in their language and accent, they are more comfortable,” says Hassan, adding that Arabs can’t eat spicy food.

Unlike other countries, people from the Arab countries bring medical records in Arabic language. “We have to read it for doctors and convey the patients’ problems,” says Hassan, a freelancer who works for many hospitals. Patient care coordinators Madhushree Saha and Sweety Sen also translate. “We know Bengali very well and we translate it into English. Most Bangladeshis who come to our hospital can’t speak English,” they say.

A senior interpreter earns approximately Rs40,000 a month. Mohamed Jaffer Sadiq Ali, who earlier worked in a mosque, joined Global Hospitals as a translator four years ago. “At least three patients arrive every day from countries in the Gulf region,” he says. An official from a private hospital said of all international patients, traffic from the SAARC countries alone is 35 per cent and 25 per cent is from the Middle East.