A Golden Opportunity for New York City-based (or any other) Translators!

From an article in the April 30, 2007 issue of Science Daily (read the whole article here)

“Many NYC Pharmacies Fail To Translate Prescription Labels For Patients Who Don’t Understand English Science Daily — Despite widespread capacity to provide prescription medication labels in languages other than English, few New York City pharmacies do so and as a result, limited-English patients face serious risk of medication error, according to a study by The New York Academy of Medicine presented at the annual meeting of the Society for General Internal Medicine (SGIM) in Toronto, Ontario.”

And then, things become really, really interesting 🙂

For this study, the investigators randomly selected 200 pharmacies from the 2,186 licensed pharmacies in New York City in 2006. Participating pharmacies included independent drugstores, chains, and outpatient hospital and clinic pharmacies. They found that while 88 percent of surveyed New York City pharmacists reported serving LEP customers daily, only 34 percent reported translating labels daily, despite 80 percent reporting the ability to do so. Another 26 percent never translate labels.

New York City is home to 130 languages and 8.2 million people, including 2.9 million foreign-born residents. An estimated one of every four adult New Yorkers cannot speak or read English well and 46 percent of the city’s population speaks a language other than English at home.

Now, let’s do some quick, quantitative mini-market research. You can refine it later, that will be your homework!

Here goes:

2186 X 66% = 1443 (New York City pharmacists who do not translate labels daily)

1443 X 500 words = 721500 (500 words being the average label length)

751500 X $0.15 = 108225 per language and per prescription label ($0.15 per word. If you want to charge less or more, that’s your business, my friend 😉

108225 X 130 = $14.069.250 FOR EACH PRESCRIPTION LABEL! (130 is the number of languages

If you live in NYC, contact them immediately (walk, go by train, bus, taxi, phone them, direct mail them, etc…) and make them an offer they cannot refuse!

If you are in the U.S. or Canada: Yellow Page them, Google them, Yahoo them, MSN them or, much better look them up in directories, etc…

Even if you are abroad, you can still try your luck (this is a global world, after all!)