Award Recipients

Yilu Ma, MS, MA, CMI, is the Director of the Interpreter Services Department at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and, since early 2024, concurrently overseeing Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital Interpreter Services. During his 15-year tenure at the Brigham, Interpreter Services has undergone a transformation, continuously expanding its reach and influence from less than 40,000 encounters a year in 2011 to over 250,000 now, largely due to its significant investments in technology, while holding in-person interpreting steady and strong. A passionate, decades-long advocate for the status and profile of medical interpreters, he tirelessly educates clinicians, executive leaders and other stakeholders on the essential roles of interpreters, translators and the profession. Interpreter Services never misses a single International Translation Day annual celebration, where hospital leaders and colleagues recognize and congratulate the teams. Yilu consistently pushes for team building, investing heavily on interpreters’ professional development and growth at national conferences and events. Over the past seven years, Interpreter Services teamed up with Palliative Care Team to host monthly conversations and dialogues with clinicians on various cultural and linguistic topics in patient care, the outcomes and achievements of which were published in a professional journal. Thanks to these efforts, interpreters feel ever more confident to speak out, empower themselves as equal members of the care team and so acknowledged and respected by their colleagues. While remote interpreting being a valuable back-up option, particularly in the midst of the pandemic, to Yilu, it can never be equated with in-person interpreting by this staff who know their patients and deliver most compassionate care to their patients. He envisions that professional interpreters will surely play a bigger role in written translations as technology and AI loom larger. To improve interpreting access and quality of care, he collaborated with physicians, nurses, safety and quality staff in designing and implementing a variety of programs; NRC patient data has consistently ranked the Brigham more than 30 percent above their national peers. Under his leadership, his departments have won an array of awards and prizes, including the Brigham Way, Brigham Lotus award, QUEST, iCARE, etc.

As the former Treasurer and board member of the IMIA from 2006-2010, he played a key role in hosting national conferences in Boston, amplifying interpreters’ message, growing its membership, and pioneering professionalization. He was one of the earliest SMEs in testing, designing the NBCMI certifications. To recognize his contributions, he was granted the IMIA service award.

A former adjunct professor at Cambridge College and Boston University, Yilu has trained hundreds of medical interpreters and translators, teaching extensively on interpreting, translation and cross-cultural communication courses. He presented nationally at Paving the Way and IMIA conferences.

Yilu co-compiled and published the New-Age Chinese-English Dictionary in 2000, by the Commercial Press and recently his piece “Call Me Dr. XXX!” was published by Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. As an editor of the Heart & Science, a publication of the Brigham, he contributed and wrote on intercultural communication, interdisciplinary collaboration and the roles of medical interpreters in bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps.

Before the current position, Yilu was the Director of the Interpreter Services Department at Tufts Medical Center, and prior to this, the Manager of the Interpreter Services Department at Boston Medical Center. A very experienced medical interpreter himself, he has interpreted in most major hospitals in Boston. Yilu is also a competent simultaneous interpreter, with years of experience in conference interpreting. He holds a BA in British and American literature; a post-graduate degree in linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University; an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; and an MS in computer science from River College.