Developing bilingual patient education materials. Problems and solutions

The bilingual format presents a challenging set of problems for media producers. Four factors seem to be of primary importance to the success of bilingual materials: 1. Identifying the unique educational and cultural characteristics of the target audience. 2. Developing strategies to establish credibility with the target audience. 3. Determining the most appropriate dialect for non-English scripts. 4. Designing a 'tri-script' to allow all project planners to easily follow the script in both languages. The article describes the development of a series of bilingual patient education materials on Renal Transplantation, particularly focussing on the efforts of the development team in regard to each of the four factors listed above.