Community Accessibility of Health Information and the Consequent Impact for Translation Into Community Languages (Report‪)‬

1. Introduction In a multilingual and multicultural society such as Australia, effective community-wide communication among diverse groups of language speakers with different cultural backgrounds is a constantly challenging issue. One of the areas where it is of significance is in the health and medical fields. In New South Wales, the Multicultural Health Communication Service (MHCS) takes a leading role on meeting the health information needs of Australians from a wide range of language backgrounds. It provides advice and services to state-based health professionals aiming to communicate with non-English-background speakers. A central question for this organisation is the quality of the information that is written in English for subsequent translation into different community languages. Despite the organisation's advocacy of the use of Plain English (personal communication, April 2007), a major concern is the written quality and readership accessibility of health-related texts written in English, which are used as the basis for translations into a number of different languages used in the community. In particular, there is a view that the role of Plain English in the preparation of translated materials appears to be misunderstood and underestimated.