Every vet starts with one language barrier: the patient can’t tell us where it hurts. A horse won’t describe its pain, and a camel will hide it for as long as it can. So we rely on the people around the animal, the owner, the trainer and the handler who sees it every day, to speak for it.
In the Gulf I often have a second barrier. My Arabic is good enough to greet a trainer, ask how long the camel has been lame, and understand about half of the answer. Half an answer is the dangerous part. It sounds a lot like a whole one.
I’ve worked here since 2018, first in Qatar and now in Abu Dhabi, with camels and horses. This is how I’ve learned to cope with both barriers.
The patient who can’t talk
Animals don’t tell, they show: in appetite, posture, gait and even the face. Researchers have built pain scales from facial expressions alone. The Horse Grimace Scale, for example, scores six features, such as ears held stiffly back and tightening around the eyes, to pick up pain after surgery. Prey animals are also good at hiding pain, which is useful in the wild and very unhelpful in a clinic.
That’s why veterinary consultations are really three-way conversations, between the vet, the client and the animal, and why the history matters so much. The person who knows the animal is my best diagnostic tool.
So with the animal I look longer, touch more and measure what I can: temperature, heart rate, feed intake, how much weight it puts on each leg. And I ask handlers to film the animal at home, walking, eating and lying down. Twenty seconds of video from the stable often tells me more than a page of history.
The people who speak for it
In a Gulf stable, the person holding the animal is rarely the person who owns it. A case usually involves an owner, a manager or trainer, and one or more handlers, who don’t always share a first language with each other, let alone with me. That shouldn’t surprise anyone: about three in four people living in the UAE and Qatar were born abroad.
On a normal day I switch between English, my broken Arabic, and Urdu or Hindi. Urdu is my secret weapon. The camel world has long relied on handlers from Pakistan, Sudan and beyond, and the people who spend all day with the animals notice what nobody else does: the camel that stopped finishing its feed, the horse that rests the same leg every evening. Some of my best history-taking happens in Urdu, crouched in the sand next to the person who actually knows the animal.
Messages break on the way back, too. Most instructions pass through two or three people before they reach the animal, and each one shortens them a little. “Twice a day for five days, after feeding, and no training until I’ve seen him again” can arrive as “give the medicine”. Numbers and time are the most fragile: doses, days, before or after food, how long before the next race. And a nod means very little. A “yes” often means “I heard you”, not “I understood and I’ll do it”.
How I cope
Learn the language of the job first. Before conversational Arabic, I learned numbers, days, body parts, morning and evening, tomorrow, stop, walk, no running. A few hundred words cover most of what goes wrong in a treatment plan.
Show, don’t tell. I point at the radiograph and draw on it. I let the owner feel the heat in the tendon. I film the bandaging or the injection and send the video.
Write it down, in their language. After a visit I send the plan on WhatsApp: a photo of each medicine, the dose, the times and the stop date, in short sentences. I write it in English, translate it into Arabic, and send a voice note in Urdu to the handler.
Trust machine translation only as far as I can check it. It’s very good at short, literal sentences. In a 2025 study of hospital discharge instructions, GPT-4 and Google Translate got 97% and 96% of Spanish sentences right, but only 89% and 80% of Russian ones, and more than half of the Russian instruction sets contained at least one error. None of the studies I found tested Arabic, Urdu or Hindi. So I keep it simple, and never send a translation of something I couldn’t also explain with my hands.
Ask them to show me. “Did you understand?” always gets a yes. “Show me how you’ll give it” tells me the truth. In human medicine this is called the teach-back method, and it’s the most useful habit I’ve picked up.
Find the person who decides. Costs, risks and bad news go to the owner, or whoever makes the decisions, not only to the person holding the lead rope.
Use interpreters properly. When the stakes are high, I find someone the owner trusts, brief them first and speak to the owner rather than to the interpreter. A study of translated veterinary consultations found what I’d noticed: the conversation becomes three-way, meaning gets lost, and clients start talking to the translator instead of the vet.
Say bad news plainly, once. Simple words, no jargon, then silence. When I soften bad news to be polite, the softening survives the translation and the news doesn’t.
Don’t rush the greeting. The coffee, the questions about family and the long hellos aren’t small talk here. They’re how trust gets built, and trust carries a lot of what my Arabic can’t.
What both barriers taught me
Both barriers teach the same lesson: don’t rely on words alone. Watch, touch, measure, show, write it down, and check. Those habits make me a clearer vet in every language, including English.
The research points the same way. Horse owners trust their vets more when visits aren’t rushed and they see the same vet each time. Patients who face a language barrier get care close to everyone else’s when they have a trained interpreter rather than whoever happens to be nearby. Communication isn’t the soft part of clinical work. It’s part of the treatment.
My patients will never tell me where it hurts, and my Arabic is still broken. I’m working on it, shway shway, little by little. My instructions don’t have to be broken.
References
- Dalla Costa, E., Minero, M., Lebelt, D. et al. (2014). Development of the Horse Grimace Scale (HGS) as a pain assessment tool in horses undergoing routine castration. PLOS ONE, 9(3), e92281. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092281
- Radford, A., Stockley, P., Silverman, J. et al. (2006). Development, teaching, and evaluation of a consultation structure model for use in veterinary education. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, 33(1), 38–44. doi:10.3138/jvme.33.1.38
- United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2025). International Migrant Stock 2024: Key facts and figures. un.org
- Khalaf, S. N. (2010). Dubai camel market transnational workers: an ethnographic portrait. City & Society, 22(1), 97–118. doi:10.1111/j.1548-744X.2010.01032.x
- Kong, M., Fernandez, A., Bains, J. et al. (2025). Evaluation of the accuracy and safety of machine translation of patient-specific discharge instructions: a comparative analysis. BMJ Quality & Safety, published online 9 July 2025. doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2024-018384
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Use the teach-back method: Tool 5. Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit. ahrq.gov
- Almendros, A., Steagall, P. V. et al. (2024). Challenges of the Calgary–Cambridge consultation guide in veterinary multicultural and multilingual scenarios and the role of veterinary translators. Animals, 14(15), 2270. PMC11310950
- Shaw, J. R. & Lagoni, L. (2007). End-of-life communication in veterinary medicine: delivering bad news and euthanasia decision making. Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, 37(1), 95–108. doi:10.1016/j.cvsm.2006.09.010
- Rutherford, D. J. & England, J. T. (2024). Communication skills influence horse owners’ trust in their equine veterinarians. Veterinary Record, 195(10), e4705. doi:10.1002/vetr.4705
- Karliner, L. S., Jacobs, E. A., Chen, A. H. & Mutha, S. (2007). Do professional interpreters improve clinical care for patients with limited English proficiency? A systematic review of the literature. Health Services Research, 42(2), 727–754. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6773.2006.00629.x