10 Facts You Need To Know If You Want To Translate Medical Texts

So you need to acquire a new reliable partner at your company to translate your content into various languages.

You had an urgent operation while abroad and you need to translate your medical files into French.

You are managing clinical research and you need to translate some questionnaires about drug outcomes into other languages.

This is just a small example of numerous situations in which people need serious, high-quality translation outcomes.

I recommend you read this article carefully as it will try to help you understand the facts you need to know before acquiring a medical translation.

Although its name might suggest that it is a sub-field in translation, medical translation is a separate field in the translation industry. Medical translation is a separate entity as it is a highly regulated field and it needs specific qualifications and thus is labeled as a separate field most of the time, even among not specialized translation agencies.

Although most agencies provide the service, in fact, as this field is highly specialized, you need a specialized translation agency specialized only in medical translations. Usually, such a process needs highly specialized translators and reviewers, dedicated to this field exclusively, furthermore, they need to have actual medical experts aboard to check the outcomes from the expert’s point of view. Such requirements make it impossible for general translation companies to compile with, thus, they either provide lower quality or outsource such works.

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Depending on the text, medical translation is quite different from any other field of translation. Text migration is tightly controlled when migrating one source text from one language to another, or from one country to another, the first challenge is to produce a text that is similar to the original text. Controlling the proper migration is done by several methods, one of which is a backward translation of the whole translated text and then performing a discussion between the project managers and linguistic experts. Another control tool is an additional review performed by a local medical doctor that speaks both the source and target languages and is familiar with the medical language in the targeted country.

Medical translation is a very wide field that includes medical journal articles, medical educational content, pharmaceutical research, Pharma drug support services, clinical trials, doctor-to-patient communication, medical-legal documents, and communication and medical devices. Having said that, experts in each and every subfield are needed as some fields can be quite different. We know today that medical specialties are studied separately in most of the world, thus ophthalmology is a totally different education than internal medicine and needs longer and different professional educational time. High-quality translation agencies specialized in medical translations must have specialists in those unique subfields to be able to deliver proper products.