Tense, Aspect, and Role in a Hospital Interpretation
At a county hospital, interpreter Núria is rendering a pre-surgery intake. The patient says: "No sabía que tenía que ayunar." Later the nurse says: "I was going to ask you about allergies, but the chart was blank." The patient responds: "Si lo hubiera sabido, se lo habría dicho a alguien." Asked whether she has ever had trouble waking from anesthesia, the patient answers with an anecdote that begins: "Cuando me operaron del apéndice, hace unos años..." Midway through, the nurse says, "Don't interpret all that - just summarize for me in the third person whether she's had a reaction." Núria has ten seconds to decide what to do.
1. Justify Núria's rendering of the patient's first two tense choices, and explain what an alternate choice would wrongly imply in the medical record.
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"No sabía que tenía que ayunar" → imperfect sabía. The imperfect presents the not-knowing as an ongoing state of affairs in the background, which is exactly what the patient asserts: throughout the period before surgery, she was unaware. The preterite no supe would mean "I didn't find out / I failed to learn," i.e., a bounded event of not-discovering - a different and much less useful clinical claim.
The embedded tenía que is likewise imperfect: the obligation obtained during that background period. A preterite tuve que ayunar would assert that she did in fact fast - the opposite of her point.
"I was going to ask you" → "Iba a preguntar(le)." The imperfect here is future-in-the-past, presenting an intention that was already formed and then interrupted; fui a preguntar would report a completed action of going to ask, which did not happen.
Why it matters clinically: the record will say whether the patient failed to follow instructions or was never told. Choosing the preterite converts a communication failure into a patient-compliance failure, which is both inaccurate and potentially harmful to her care.
2. Render the counterfactual and explain the grammatical reasoning, including why more than one apodosis is acceptable.
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"Si lo hubiera sabido, se lo habría dicho a alguien."
- The protasis takes the pluscuamperfecto de subjuntivo (hubiera sabido) because it describes a condition contrary to fact in the past. Spanish does not allow the indicative here (si lo había sabido would report a real, repeated past situation: "whenever I had found out").
- The apodosis takes the conditional perfect (habría dicho) to mark a consequent that did not occur.
- The -ra form is doubly employed in Spanish: hubiera dicho is also fully acceptable in the apodosis in most varieties, so "Si lo hubiera sabido, se lo hubiera dicho" is grammatical, not an error. Núria should not "correct" a patient who uses it, but her own rendering should stay consistent.
Pragmatic check: decirle a alguien preserves the indefiniteness of "someone." Rendering it as se lo habría dicho al médico would add a referent the patient did not supply - a small addition that can shift apparent responsibility in a malpractice-adjacent record.
3. The nurse asks for a third-person summary instead of full interpretation. How should Núria handle the request, and what is at stake?
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She should not silently comply with a summarization request that removes the patient's own voice from a clinical encounter. The interpreter's role is to render meaning faithfully in the first person so that both parties hear the same content; summarizing inevitably selects, and selection is where clinical detail goes missing.
A defensible sequence in the ten seconds available:
- Finish rendering the answer, but compress the narrative only with the patient's knowledge - e.g., ask, "¿Quiere que le diga al médico lo esencial?"
- Render in the first person: "Dice que cuando la operaron del apéndice le costó despertar" - not "she reports a history of..."
- Name the constraint out loud: "Prefiero interpretar lo que ella dice; si quiere, le pregunto directamente si hubo dificultad para despertar." Then put the nurse's yes/no question to the patient.
What is at stake: the anesthesia question is a safety screen, and a summary can drop the exact detail - duration, intubation, a family member's report - that changes management. It also converts a patient's own account into a third party's characterization, which is precisely the shift that interpreters are trained to avoid.