Prescription for a medical translation
Health is everyone’s most precious possession. Hence the international collaboration both in developing new treatment and in dispensing existing treatment.
Yet, international means across countries, which implies that knowledge has to overcome language boundaries. So medical documents have to undergo an in-depth scrutiny and precise translation by medical translators as they “cross the border”. This is called a “medical translation” and is best performed by MDs or by people who received a high level of medical formal education.
A mistake in a medical translation might have dramatic consequences, which is why it is best that at least two medical linguists work on each medical translation, one translating and one editing the translation.
Health is far too valuable to entrust it to an automated translator. When human translators perform medical translations, with no machine translation at all, it considerably reduces the risk to lose life-saving nuances.
This is especially important when the documents are translated between a latin language into a non-latin one such as Hebrew for example. The vast differences in the 2 languages logic and structure, such as exposed in our previous blog “Don’t get ‘Lost in translation’” are further increasing the risk of using automated translation for medical documents.
As medical translation are especially important for documents reaching a large number of people such as medications notices and such, BACK TRANSLATIONS and RECONCILIATION procedures ensures that the content of the original document is reflected exactly in the final translation.
