Google Translate: Can It Be a Solution for Language Barrier in Neuraxial Anaesthesia?

Neuraxial anaesthesia, which is the method of choice for caesarean section, requires adequate communication between the patient and the anaesthesiologist in the perioperative period. This may become a cause for concern in patients with language barriers. In such cases, clinicians either avoid neuraxial anaesthesia or try ‘getting by’, which in essence means using gestures, mimics and limited key words to communicate in the absence of a live professional interpreter (1, 2). In this report, we shared our experience with a Moroccan patient undergoing spinal anaesthesia for caesarean section, for whom we used the voice translation property of the Google Translate application (GT) to overcome the language barrier using a mobile phone.