Medical and Pharmaceutical Translation
Medical and Pharmaceutical translation is a highly specialised
discipline and should only ever be carried out by suitably
qualified translators.
That's why we only ever use specialist translators who are
doctors or biomedical engineers, have experience in your particular
medical field and have language degrees. These translators are
extremely highly vetted and quality controlled.
Why do we use only medically qualified translators for medical
translations?
Knowing a foreign language alone is simply not enough. The plain
truth of translation is that a text must be understood before it
can be translated. We are all confident of our knowledge of
English, aren't we? Let us take a small self-test by considering
two short sentences sourced from a medical text:
Tympanites and atony of the gastro-intestinal tract are
often the first indications of parenteral nutrition, necessitated
due to faulty utilisation of oral feeds.
Distention of the congested intestinal layers is possibly a
contributory cause of blocked anastamosis or its
dehiscence.
Honestly, how much of that did you understand? How easy was it
to read? You can speak English ok, but understanding a medical text
is a very different matter.
You can now see how a translator without a scientific or medical
background would feel when faced with this text. Translators
translate from a foreign language into her mother tongue. In other
words, a translator should ideally be a native speaker of the
language she is translating into. Somebody may possess excellent
bi-lingual skills, but hiring her as a translator is a sure-fire
recipe for disaster in translation, unless she is also an expert in
her field.
Medical and scientific writing has its own turn of phrase. In
medical texts written in German, for example, Anamnese is a
commonly used word. Dictionaries give anamnesis as the English
equivalent - and a translator who relies solely on dictionaries is
looking for trouble. Why? Well, medical practitioners the world
over never use the expression "anamnesis". They just call it "case
history of a patient".
By the same token, hiring a translator with specialised subject
skills to the exclusion of language skills is no less prone to
pitfalls. For instance, a subject expert may spend many a sleepless
night over the English equivalent of Patientengut, a German word
best translated as "patient records".
Style, we all know, is the way in which something is said, done,
expressed, or performed. Have we ever observed that
scientific-technical writing has its own style? To illustrate the
point, let us take a concrete example. Faithful to the style of the
source language, a translation would read:
Owing to improvements in medical first-aid and rescue
services, a steadily increasing number of severely injured accident
victims reach clinics in a condition in which intensive therapy may
be started.
After correction for style by a qualified subject and language
expert, the same sentence would read:
Advancements in medical first-aid and rescue services have
made it possible to immediately administer intensive care to an
increasing number of severe cases of accident victims who are
brought to hospitals.
Need we say more?
Regardless of the subject area of your documentation we are able
to provide translation for 140 languages in a timely and cost
effective manner.
Here are some of the areas we have previously translated
documents for:
- Anesthesia
- Biostatistics
- Cardiology
- Dentistry
- Diagnostics
- Electro diagnosis
- Endoscopy
- Endocrinology
- Medicine
- Prosthetics
- Toxicology