Medical companies, such as pharmaceuticals, or companies that manufacture medical technology, who wish to sell their products in other countries will need to translate many different documents in order to satisfy legislation. For instance, clinical trial paperwork, product instructions, contents listings, certifications, and so on, are required when moving into new markets abroad.
A medical company’s website is a vital marketing tool, and technical resource, but is also often the first port of call for new customers. Content such as marketing copy, instruction manuals, blogs, information for doctors, and so on, are all contained within the website, and some of this content will require translation – not only for information purposes, but also for legal reasons.
Each country has its own agencies that deal with legislation for the medical industry. Specific requirements will vary depending upon location, content, audience, and regulations. These regulations are constantly changing, so medical companies need to stay on top of translation guidelines, and laws for their particular products.
Additionally, medical translations require extreme accuracy; there’s little room for error when your product can affect life and death situations, people’s safety and welfare, or could mean litigation if mistranslations cause wrongful use.
The following tips will offer the best practices to follow to ensure your medical website translation goes smoothly, with the outcomes you require.
Preparation for Translation and Localisation
Where possible you should begin your localisation development in the early stages of your web design and development. This will allow for Internationalisation (i18n) to occur at an early stage thus ensuring that your website can be easily adapted for multiple languages, and locations.
Your translation team will require glossaries for frequently used terms, common products, industry related terminology, and other medical information that is recurrent, as this will enable a speedier, more accurate, translation service.
Translation
Once you have provided all the necessary information to your translation team, they can begin working on your project.
Professional translation companies will use your glossaries to establish a Translation Memory (TM), which will be used by the translators to ensure consistency, accuracy, and speed within your translation.
Once the translation is complete, proof-reading, editing, reviewing, and quality assurance tests should be completed by your translation provider to guarantee the quality of your translation project. This is usually undertaken by native speakers and in-country teams to ensure high standards.
The Completed Translation Project
Once translations, and quality checks are complete your translation team will deliver the translated files to you. This can either be done directly to your website if your translation provider uses a proxy-based service, allowing for remote access to files without the need for constant emails back and forth, or via the an internet delivery system, such as email.
The benefit of proxy- based servers are that whenever a change is made to the original website the translation provider will receive a notification, thus allowing for a faster translation service.
Quantifiable Translation Quality
Accuracy is vital for medical translations, so your Translation provider should offer a quantifiable quality process from start to finish that will measure standards, service, procedures, and improvement processes.
Although quality can be difficult to define – what is acceptable to one company may not be acceptable to another, however, there are a few things you should consider when assessing quality:
• Subjectivity – individual bias, perception, and views can affect what people see as quality. Set out your requests for quality early on in the translation process.
• Time – a rushed job is likely to impinge on the quality of your translation. Be prepared and plan ahead.
• Expectations – have clear, concise parameters that you are prepared to stick to. Discuss these with your translation team in the early stages of translation.
Communicating with your translation provider is essential for setting clear boundaries of quality, and ensuring you are completely satisfied with the end results. The quality assurance process should follow a definite procedure so that it is repeatable, and accurate.
Specialist Medical Translation Providers
Medical translations require specialist translators who have experience of medical procedures, and technology, and who are native speakers of the target language. This is vital for accurate, high quality translations.
Check that your translation team has translators who are experts in your specific medical field, as terminology from one branch of medicine can vary to another.
Alongside expert translators, your translation provider should offer a project manager, IT specialists, web-design experts, proof-readers, and multilingual Quality Assurance testers.
ISO Certification
Professional medical translation companies should offer certifications to show how committed the company is to medical translations. ISO certifications set rigorous standards, and if a company has these they are more likely to guarantee high quality translations.
The following are a list of ISO certificates which are applicable to the translation industry:
• ISO 9001:2015 general quality standard
• ISO 17000:2015 a specific quality standard for translation companies
• ISO 13485:2016 a quality standard for companies that deal with medical devices, and related services. This certificate shows that a translation company has at least 50% of its business within the medical devices sector.
These standards are helpful when selecting your translation provider, so always ask which ISO certifications the company holds. Another point worth highlighting here is checking which other companies use your chosen service provider. If there are many companies within the medical sector you can expect that they have vast experience with medical translations.
Medical website translations require specialist knowledge. Translation providers that offer this service are likely to be more expensive than their counterparts who don’t specialise in medical translations, but they should have ISO certificates, in-country translators, quantifiable quality checks, and an extensive team who assist with translations. If they don’t have these, consider finding a translation provider who does.
