Healthcare translations for Hispanics with HIV involve more than changing English words into Spanish ones. It’s important, as with any healthcare translations, to ensure the message, visuals, and channel are appropriate and effective for the intended audience. Beyond creating materials in both English and Spanish, creators of patient education campaigns should understand the unique challenges that the diverse Hispanic population in the US faces as well as opportunities to connect and build trust.
HIV and the Hispanic community
The last decade has seen both discouraging and encouraging trends when it comes to Hispanics with HIV in the United States. A 2018 article in the journal AIDS and Behavior asserted that once they are diagnosed with HIV, Latinos experience disproportionately poorer clinical outcomes compared with non-Latino whites. The CDC’s 2019 HIV Surveillance Report indicated that the rates of diagnoses of HIV infections for Hispanic/Latino adults and adolescents decreased from 2015 to 2019, but CDC reports from 2022 show that compared with 2018, HIV diagnoses increased by 17% among Hispanic/Latino persons overall. In 2019, 51% of Hispanic people reported ever having been tested for HIV (which was higher than the overall average of 43%). According to the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), in 2022, only 44% of Hispanic people reported ever having been tested for HIV (still higher than the 36% reported by U.S. adults overall). And according to the Office of Minority Health (OMH) of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Hispanic males were four times more likely to have either HIV infection or AIDS compared to non-Hispanic white males in 2022.
Messaging matters
The key messages in a variety of social campaigns, patient education and prevention networks are to stay on medication as prescribed and stay undetectable. Once your viral load is undetectable, you can’t transmit the virus. We worked on a series of videos in Spanish to illustrate this point in an effort to raise awareness among Hispanics with HIV at Help Stop the Virus.
One of the challenges when working in healthcare translations for a particular population is to find the current terminology that is being used. We do quite a bit of research on our end, reading various blogs, social media posts, and forums to see the current terminology that is being used. This was true for the term “undetectable” (used in HIV materials) or the acronym MSM (men who have sex with men).
The term “undetectable” is sometimes used in English to describe a person with an undetectable viral load of HIV, like on liveundetectable.org and this Minnesota Department of Health webpage. This is very different in Spanish, because a person cannot be undetectable, only a virus. Our team felt that a literal translation of “being undetectable” sounds too much like “being invisible,” which we don’t want to attribute to a population that already faces stigma. This was an instance when we had to justify the addition of text to the translation in order to clarify that the virus is undetectable. Translation in healthcare requires an understanding and research of the subject matter, the target population, and the goal of the information.
If you are working with patient education, advocacy or healthcare communications, you need a partner in healthcare translations that can support you with research and go beyond translation. Give us a call.
