Since Viet Nam has successfully gained its accession to WTO, and the Bush administration has granted Vietnam with Permanent Normal Trading Status (PNTR), a wide range of actors, including US enterprises, is expected to be here. It is also envisaged that US HI providers will do business in our country, hence a demand for the translation work in the field will be inevitable. The problem lies in the fact that sharp differences in the US HI and the Vietnamese one result in several diffrent HI plans between the two countries. Undoubtedly, this will pose a great obstacle to translators due to their insufficient knowledge about the two different sub-cultures of health insurance. They may have to squeeze their brain to convey the true essence of each kind of health plans from English in Vietnamese.
In the USA, quite a few Vietnamese-American are full time employees in American companies and factories, hence eligible to HI coverage offered by their employers. Annually, the companies and factories have the so-called enrollment for their employees to enroll for health benefits or to choose the health plan that best benefits them. To guarantee that their employees do not end up in wrong decisions, which goes in counter with their benefits due to the failure to understand HI plans written in English, they have them translated by Vietnamese and native American translators.
In Vietnam, though translators do not have to translate such HI plans for clients, they still have to translate a number of presumably popular HI terms, including many in the US HI plans for at least insurance-majored students or for training courses held by some insurance carriers.
Having studied and compared the original and the translated versions by different translators, I have come up with an idea of making an investigation into how HI terms in the US HI plans are currently dealt with. Hopefully, the study, titled “A study on the equivalence between English and Vietnamese translation of insurance terms in US HI plans”, may be of some use to those who have been and will do translation in the field.