Abstract:

The affluence of migrant communities to Spain, with its linguistic and cultural particularities, has caused, among other phenomena, the rise of new communication needs. Social groups not speaking the majority language of a country need to have access to certain contents and information. So, it is necessary to promote the multilingual dissemination of that information. This is especially relevant in such a sensitive area as healthcare. Translation and interpreting, as disciplines and as professional practices, play a leading role in meeting the communication needs between healthcare professionals and migrant communities.
In this regard, an interesting trend known as transcreation has been observed in recent years in the field of translation. Transcreation is a process by which some parts of a text are translated and others are creatively reinterpreted. Within the healthcare sector, it focuses on adapting materials designed for health information and health education to facilitate its better understanding by people of other cultures or ethnicities. Several studies have explored the capacity of transcreation of healthcare materials (from information leaflets to IT tools) as a means of including and reaching out to linguistic minorities. This reduces the disparity in access to the healthcare system and promotes the inclusion of migrants.
According to the INE (Spanish National Institute of Statistics) data (2020), the country from which more immigrants come to Spain is Morocco. Considering the population originating from other countries where French is an official language (France, Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland, Mali, Senegal and Canada), the French-speaking population resident in Spain is considerable.
The main objective of this work is to identify the strategies of linguistic and cultural adaptation that have been carried out in Spain in recent years to facilitate access to health information and education for the French-speaking migrant population through the use of informative leaflets. Specifically, the aim is to determine the extent to which transcreation processes are being applied in the translation this type of text. This objective is divided into three specific objectives: SO1) to design a set of indicators of the presence of transcreation strategies in information leaflets, SO2) to apply these indicators to a sample of leaflets and their translations into French in the healthcare field produced in Spain in recent years and SO3) to validate that set of indicators.
The methodology consisted in a two-phase process. First, the indicators were designed according to a bibliographical revision of the scientific literature on the matter. These indicators were built on a numeric scale to facilitate the later processing of the data. Second, the set of indicators was applied to a sample of leaflets and data were collected and treated with the SPSS statistical package.
The validation of the data determined which indicators were not relevant for evaluating transcreation in the sample, resulting in a final validated set of indicators. The statistical analysis of frequencies made it possible to quantitatively measure the values of each indicators, providing knowledge of the state of transcreation in the healthcare sector in Spain in the last decade. The study concluded that there has not been a clear evolution in this respect over time and that transcreation processes are not yet applied to translate and culturally adapt this type of material.

Keywords:

Health education, translation, transcreation, information access.