Accuracy and
high-quality should be the most important decision factors when choosing your medical
translations partner as there is no room for mistakes or ambiguities.
Here are our top ten
tips to keep in mind when starting a new medical translation project:
1) Use
medically trained, in-country translators.
There are certain concepts and contexts that only a professional translator
from a medical background can fully understand and localise appropriately.
2) Use
original source documents
Source documents could be created using any number of applications or
programs, such as InDesign, html, XML or Powerpoint. Try to avoid quality limiting and time
consuming cut & paste processes from Word docs or PDFs and instead work
with the original files directly in the translation process.
3) Keep it concise
and unambiguous
Try to avoid using too many words when one will do the job! It will make the translators job a lot easier
and leave less opportunity for misinterpretation. Also consider that in many cases, translating
text from English to a target language such as German or Spanish will often
expand the length of the words by up to 30%.
4) Allow
extra space in your design layout
Will your initial designs still be suitable
once you’ve taking consideration of the fact that some words may be longer when
translated? What about the fact that
Arabic or Hebrew read Right to Left?
Will this mean having to move your images and bullet points around on
the page?
5) Do you
need Transcreation?
Think carefully about using country
specific content for international campaigns.
It may be the case that translation and localisation is not sufficient
and what you actually require is the campaign to be transcreated, i.e., recreated
and culturally adapted so that it makes sense in the target territory. In this instance, rather than translating the
source words, you will need to refer to the initial brief and employ
copywriters in each location to come up with new headlines, etc.
6) Avoid
‘rasterised’ or flattened images that contain source-language text
It will be hard to extract the text and
recreate the original images in the new target language, and will only add
extra delays in your time-line.
7) Get
the quality right the first time
Don’t rely on reviews by your in-country
teams – it’s not their main job or expertise and often they don’t have time to
do extensive translation review/re-work to correct initial poor translation.
8) Maintain
the quality focus throughout the project
The typical medical translation review
process can have up to four steps:
- Translation
- Revision 1
- Revision 2
- Ethics Committee – Client Review
In some instances, client may also require
Back Translation, to allow a non-linguist to review the quality of the
translation.
It is equally important to ensure that the
same level of quality control is applied to the layout of your final formatted
documents that use the translated text.
9) Find
a true partner
Translation is part of your final product
in the target markets, so make sure your translation partner shares your own
high standards. Translation should not be viewed as simply an outsourced
commodity purchase, but instead an integral part of your material and offering.
10) Get
references
Ask for references, case studies or
testimonials from your chosen translation partner.
Dr Mark Hooper is a director at Conversis Medical. For more information visit conversis.com
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