Translating documents in healthcare, medicine, pharmaceutical products, medical devices, and clinical trials are referred to as medical translation. All translations are informed permission forms, medical device manuals (IFU/DFU), hospital records, and medical reports. Medical translations must be performed by trained medical translators knowledgeable about the subject matter and practice area.
A patient upon entering a medical facility to receive treatment, the doctor in charge will write an outlining paper observation and register the treatments performed. This will be recorded in the patient’s medical record.
A medical report is a reference record for any professionals who will help patients throughout their lives. It may also be helpful when seeking disability benefits or proving that a patient has a specific condition.
There is no standardized format for medical reports. As a result, in the case of translation, the linguist must comprehend the function of the document and know how to translate medical reports without any guiding visual signals correctly.
Why Is Medical Translation Necessary?
Medical report translation enables a patient who is not a native speaker to seek specific medical attention overseas and return to his or her own country with a diagnosis that is legible by local physicists. With the advent of healthcare tourism, this is becoming increasingly common, especially when dealing with severe conditions that demand hyper-specialized therapies.
Accurate medical translation services are also essential for doctors working in multicultural settings with patients who struggle to speak and read in the local language. Providing these patients with medical documentation in their original language empowers them and puts them in control of their care. Medical records translation may also be required during some immigration processes. Medical translation services, in many circumstances, also provide medical and healthcare documentation that complies with local regulations. For example, submitting Form I-693 to the United States, Citizenship and Immigration Service needs a certified translation of your medical history.
To put it briefly, the necessity of medical translation is based on the fact that a more globalized and interconnected world requires the communication of multilingual individuals (medics, scientists, and patients). And, given that people’s lives may be at stake, an exact and careful translation is essential.
Medical Report Translation Steps
You should do certain things before you begin to get an accurate result. Let’s go over the basic steps of medical report translation.
Define what must be translated.
When a doctor submits a report, they may be required to provide a lot of basic information that other experts may find irrelevant. Consider the demands of the doctor or medical center that need the translation. When a medical report is necessary to analyze the progress of a certain ailment, the original institution will most likely prepare a report that concentrates on the sickness or covers a relatively specific time period.
Make a glossary
Medical papers, like any technical documents, use highly sophisticated vocabulary. To maintain the medical text clear and safe to use in medical decision-making processes, accurate and consistent terminology usage is critical. To eliminate errors, create a glossary of regularly used terminology and use it consistently throughout the document.
Medical personnel are well-versed in medical vocabulary and acronyms, but they lack the ability to translate them into other languages. Similarly, a competent translator with no medical training will fail to understand, let alone translate, sophisticated medical words. Proficiency in a language pair (and even translation training) may not be sufficient to qualify someone as a medical translator.
This is why medical specialists should only translate medical papers. Professional medical translators are clinical and linguistic professionals. Furthermore, medical translators must stay current on medical advances as terminology changes parallel with technological growth and research.
Is it possible to automate medical report translation?
It is risky to automate the translation of a medical record. Most free translation software degrades text quality by translating and filling the barely readable material with extremely dangerous mistakes. Even if you use these tools to “shorten” the process, you will discover that revising and reviewing the overall consistency of the text will take longer than a manual translation.
The Drawbacks of Automated Medical Report Translation
Aside from the lack of quality in medical report translation, employing tools like Google Translate necessitates entering sensitive information straight into the internet. This type of information mismanagement is unacceptable in professional situations.
An essential factor to consider when translating is the expense of any errors. Instructions for medical equipment, aircraft manuals, legal documents, and various other types of content necessitate complete correctness. In such circumstances, mistakes can cost lives, large sums of money, and irreversible damage to you or your loved ones.
However, this does not mean that automation is completely avoided. Professional-grade machine translation systems might help save time and ensure uniform terminology management. For example, a translation programme with automation capabilities may automatically substitute particular phrases for the equivalent acronym if one exists.
Partner with a Professional
How can a non-translator efficiently translate medical reports? Hiring an expert translation business is the best alternative.
While professional translation is more expensive than DIY translation, it reduces the possible dangers connected with translation to a large extent that it is worth it. On the other hand, a translation business that is mainly automating its operations should be able to generate high-quality translations within your budget.