How to Choose Your Professional Medical Translation Services? From A-Z

Choosing Professional Medical Translation Services Is No Longer a Complex Mission:

Here are some tips when choosing your medical translation company 

How to select the best language service provider (LSP) that can provide you with the finest and most accurate pharmaceutical and medical translation services? This is a serious question that matters to every medical practitioner and health institute.

Yes, it isn’t always easy to hire the right medical translation agency. This happens as the translation for the healthcare industry requires precision and up-to-date technical knowledge, providing an accurate choice of medical terminology along with maintaining an awareness of regulatory compliance.

Medical translation is not a simple process or a facile exercise in exchanging one word in the source language (SL) for another in the target language (TL). It is crucial for healthcare facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and clinical laboratory equipment manufacturers to hire specialized and qualified translators and interpreters with a high level of proficiency, so as to avoid any complexities surrounding medical translation for the reason that one tiny error or a minor flaw in content’s translation accuracy or terminology may result in serious problems and dire consequences.

Why hiring a professional linguist is paramount to having your information conveyed accurately in the Pharmaceutical and Medical Translation field?

• International Patients and Families with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) or who are deaf or hard of hearing will face a hard time at your health facility dealing with a clinician or a health expert. Therefore, Under the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, providing accurate clinical, directive, and technical information in their native language via interpreting services is a must to overcome language barriers and to achieve proper and effective communication. Interpreting services include: whispered interpreting used in a hospital appointment as a day patient, consecutive interpreting used during lab visits or press conferences, remote interpreting different parties communicate with each other through a telephone or video conference if they don’t share the same contextual setting, and liaison interpreting used to retransmit the speaker’s message sentence by sentence as in medical device manufacturers and scientific laboratories.
• Medical data accommodate innumerable complex terminologies, so a common word might deliver a different meaning in a medical context than they do in common usage. Some medical terminology as well could vary in meaning from field to field, so an interpreter or a translator with no medical background might not understand the usage based on the context of the document. Medical documentation is known to be exceptionally sensitive and needs far more than multilingual skills.
• In the medical field, some medical experts write comments or recommendations in shorthand abbreviations and symbols which are somehow or other burdensome for nonprofessional or inexperienced translators to comprehend and understand without any medical education. As known, medical translations mainly depend on the “paraphrasing” and ” localization” processes, so linguists need to do some research to ensure that they understand the terminology used in the text correctly and translate it into the target language accurately and explicitly.

Pharmaceutical and medical translation services require expertise and accuracy, so how should you choose the professional translation team you need? Here are some factors that you need to take into account for your business!

Define Your Project Scope

In order to receive accurate translations on time, it is principal to have a scope statement or terms of reference, that give an explanation of the boundaries of the project, requirements, regulations, deliverables, tasks, and deadlines. Whether you are translating medical documents, clinical data, scientific brochures, or medical software interfaces, or even creating or writing healthcare sites content that increases patient volume and should be translated into multiple languages, you ought to set up specific procedures or step-by-step criteria for how completed work will be verified and approved, and establish a concrete and consistent with the translation agency. Identifying the project scope will guarantee your satisfaction at the end of the project by the delivery of relevant and excellent output that meets your expectations, and will save you time, money, and headaches.

Honest Reviews Really Do Matter

Pharmaceutical and medical translation services are extremely challenging since the quality required to deliver excellence and credibility has a direct impact on somebody’s health or life.

Straightforward and trustworthy reviews from your colleagues via word-of-mouth recommendations or online write-ups available in search engines will surely help in your task of finding the most professional language service providers.

Don’t forget to search the online directory of professional translation associations as well as Language services directories.

If you want to have a culturally competent translation, there is no substitute for a qualified and experienced translator or interpreter who has vast knowledge and experience in medical translation as well as great reviews.

Experience Is A Must

Always keep in mind to choose a medical translation agency that specializes in the life sciences and consistently offers training programs to its qualified and experienced medical translators and interpreters.

Because of the sensitive and delicate nature of medical translations, they cannot be left in the hands of unqualified companies to avoid any medical malpractice.

Professional medical translations services providers usually recruit and hire trained translators and interpreters with high and rigorous standards or Valid National CredentialsasHub-CMI initial credential and CMI certifications, those who pay strict attention to accuracy and cultural nuances, and bring a lot of experience and commitment to the table.

We, at The Translation Gate, and our certified medical translators and experienced medical localization experts, pride ourselves on offering error-free medical translation services in over 160 languages. You are always welcome to contact us and request a quote for your medical translation projects.

High Prices Do Not Indicate High Quality

High medical translation rates don’t mean you get a translation of high quality.

As acknowledged, the most common pricing method standard is to charge by the number of words in the original/source document, and in case of interpretation, it is calculated by hour.

However, medical translation rates might vary according to various factors as language pair combination and difficulty, text complexity and subject, number of words, and timeframe.

For instance, translating Drug Registration Documents from the French language to the Chinese language will cost higher rates than that of the Spanish language.

Moreover, if the job is urgent as medicine is a growing and highly demanding field, several translators will likely work in collaboration so that the deadline can be met with a superb translation quality costing more fees. There also might be extra costs if you decide to include other services in the translation process as formatting and proofreading.

Choosing A Niche Is The Key

Before selecting a language service provider (LSP), It is pivotal to consider specialization and terminology.

There are many subdomains in the medical industry, from translating Medical Regulation and Legislation Documents to Scientific Journal Articles and Pharmacological Studies.

Finding the right terminology for medical terms can be difficult in the source language, and it will even be harder in the target language.

To explain more, a research paper on Cardiology will require different linguistic expertise than a Psychiatry case study, or a website article in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

That’s why hiring Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who narrow their expertise to a single section in the medical translation field and have in-depth knowledge of the terminology in the language pair is a prerequisite when choosing the most trusted medical translation agency for your projects.

Choosing to deal with medical translation projects is a daunting task. The Translation Gate provides outstanding and precise medical translation and localization services in more than 160 languages with more than 12 years of experience.