Understanding la Salud Mental: traducción de materiales informativos en base a las necesidades de la comunidad hispana en EE. UU.

This project combines a study of the impact of mental health disorders on the Hispanic population living in the United States with data related to their general levels of literacy. The main objective of this paper is to establish some solid social and demographic grounds from a quantitative analysis of current statistics in order to defend the translation of informative mental health documents (such as leaflets or guides) taking into account the literacy skills of the target audience. Several variables are considered in this analysis: the prevalence of mental health disorders in the US and among the Hispanic population living on its soil, the weight of this community in the demography of the country, its difficulties to access health care services, and the general literacy levels of its members. With the results obtained in this analysis, I intend to suggest several translations and editing strategies to improve the intelligibility of the aforementioned documents. These strategies include traditional methods such as language simplification and less common techniques related to concreteness or synonymy. These strategies are eventually applied on translated documents related to mental health disorders.