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Translators Without Borders is an American nonprofit group. It provides language services to nongovernmental organizations such as, yes, Doctors Without Borders. The group recently trained some new translators in Nairobi in how to put health information into local languages for Kenyans. For health translators, finding the rights words is not just about language but also culture. Muthoni Gichohi is a manager for Family Health Options Kenya, the group that organized the training. She says she has no problem expressing the names of body parts in English. But as a Kikuyu she says there are some words in her first language that may be "provocative" if she said them in public. "So I have got to really put it in another way that it is still delivering the same message, but the words will be different." Trainer Paul Warambo says the same issue arises with Kenya's national language. "Sometimes you are also forced to use euphemisms -- use a language that is more acceptable to the people. For example, in Swahili, we will not call a body part -- the vagina, for example -- we will not call it by its name. We use kitu chake --- her thing. You do not just mention it by the name, you say 'her thing.'" The culture of a community will largely decide how words and expressions are translated into socially acceptable language. In some cases, the way people in a culture think about an activity or object becomes the translated name for that activity or object. | 
