Transformation in information written by a health expert into a form which will be accessible to non-English speakers in Australia is a complex process. Australia has had an active programme of controlled migration, bringing to its shores people speaking languages from Lebanon, Central and South America, Cambodia, Laos, China and Europe. This means there is a variety of speech communities operating within the dominant L1 sociocultural context. In order to bridge the communication gap, a system of multiple transformations of both the SL and TL texts has been instituted, converting the author’s medically focused text into a more suitable register accessible to the average readership. A project dealing with speech pathology is discussed to illustrate some of the problems encountered in the transformation process, and some implications for trainers of translators are raised.