Two vocabularies: translating between clinicians and compilers

The most useful thing about living in two professional languages isn't the CV line. It's being present for the moment both sides describe the same problem and neither realises they agree.

A health worker says: "We waste an hour every morning counting what we have." A developer says: "Inventory reconciliation has no single source of truth." Same problem. The first description has the pain and no solution shape. The second has the solution shape and no pain. Both are partial. Whoever holds both can build the thing.

Where translation fails

Software people abstract too early. The workflow gets modelled as "records in a database" before anyone learns why the paper form has that weird second column. The weird column is usually load-bearing.

Clinical people abstract too late. "The computer should do exactly what we do, same steps" — preserving every workaround that exists because of a bug in a system that got replaced five years ago.

The translator's habits

• ask the clinic why a step exists before modelling it, and ask the developer what they assumed before letting them build
• demo early with real users doing real tasks, not staged walkthroughs
• keep a glossary: every domain word (dispense, refill, generic) mapped to its system equivalent. Half of health-tech failures are vocabulary failures wearing UI

Bilingual people don't just speak two languages. They catch what gets lost between them.