Why Only Professional Translators Can do Justice to Medical Translation

In a globalized world it is quite common that a hospital from say Latin America interacts and shares information regarding a disease or a treatment with a hospital in South East Asia. Also thanks to the booming medical tourism, it has become quite common that patients from one part of the globe travel to another part of the globe in search of better and more economical medical care.

In both the cases, medical documents written in one language needs to be translated into another language and this calls for services of a translator. And since the lives of people are at stake in both the cases, you can’t simple opt for any random translation service provider. You need a translator who offers precise translations, with rigid adherence to deadlines, costs, and cultural sensitivity, and above all, delivers quality that you can trust. This is necessary because even a minute mistake can have catastrophic outcomes, just like the one in Epinal, France. In an attempt to bypass the pain of hiring the services of specialized medical translator, the hospital’s medical team opted for a translation software to verify the correct dosage for treating prostate cancer by themselves. But unfortunately the calculation went wrong and a number of patients received massive overdose of radiation that instantly killed four individuals.

Just like it is not wise to opt for a divorce lawyer to manage your meeting with the IRS, it is not sensible to trust the services of a machine translation or general translation provider for specialized fields. This is particularly true in the case of highly regulated field such as medicine and clinical research.

Medical translation demands up-to-date technical expertise. It also necessitates higher levels of quality control and a thorough understanding of stringent regulatory laws. And this simply means that irrespective of whether you are translating patient documents for rendering care or processing insurance claims from documents submitted in a foreign language or preparing case report forms for FDA submission, there can be no compromise where the rings of language and healthcare regulation congregate.

The Bottom-line

In a cutthroat economy not opting for professional help may seem like a perfect way to cut corners. But having to pay for it with the lives of patients can prove to be much more costly. Unless you want to be the next big international joke, it’s wise to opt for a specialized translator to handle your next medical document translation.