A four language glossary of hospital basic terms: English- French- Swahili- Kinyarwanda

Abstract

The research on “A four language glossary of hospital basic terms: English-French-Swahili-Kinyarwanda”was aimed at compiling a glossary of terms used to refer to departments or services, health professionals and tools existing at hospital. Field tours, interviews, questionnaires and documentation are the research methods that I used to collect the 276 terms that made up the corpus of the study. The main objective was to seek for their equivalents in English, French, Swahili and Kinyarwanda in order to allow efficient medical communication in the Great Lakes region and all over the world as the languages implied are worldwide. Furthermore, this glossary will be useful to various people including patients, health professionals and owners of health care providing institutions. It will be beneficial to translators or interpreters. They will use it as a reference in their carreer once they are engaged in mediating the patient and the health care provider.