ABSTRACT
Multicultural health communication forms an integral, yet under-studied part of the national health system. It entails the development of multilingual health resources, linguistically translated and culturally adapted to meet the practical needs and reflect the actual reading habits of the intended multicultural users with diverse language and cultural backgrounds. Effective health communication and translation holds the key to the development of a shared understanding of health knowledge among multicultural populations to support needed behavioural changes. This chapter discussed the design and application of an integrated framework for the development of patient-oriented, culturally-effective (POCA) multicultural health translation resources, by integrating and adapting existing international and state health translation guidelines. The core of POCA is a set of principles for user-oriented health translation evaluation using empirical, corpus translation analyses and qualitative health translation analyses. The development of the POCA health translation evaluation model can effectively help to improve the quality, practical values and the wide social uptake of multicultural health translation as a public health promotion and disease prevention tool in Australia.
