Medical Translators are Lifesavers and Deserve Life Science Training
- Pia Windelov
- Nov 3, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 4, 2023
Language quality is crucial in life sciences and healthcare to ensure the correct and safe use of medicines and medical technologies. If you already want to leave this blog because you think I just stated the obvious, please take a moment to reflect on how important health is to you, and which role you think language plays in the constant flow of health information across geographic borders, scientific communities, patient communities and the general public.
Language is a Lifesaver
Where would we be if we didn’t have language in the first place to tell the world what science has achieved and how innovative therapies improve or even save lives? And what if we didn’t have anyone who could ensure that these messages were carrried all the way through to their intended audiences in a clear and meaningful way? Boldly stated, this is the critical role that medical translators and other language professionals play. Language professionals don’t just translate words between vocabularies; they carry meaning between audiences. Yet, their work is too often taken for granted, or even treated as a business commodity.
In this blog, I argue that medical language professionals deserve much more credit for the important work they do. Many work on a freelance basis and their efforts do not pay well despite the hard, detailed work that goes into rendering a text understandable to different audiences and in different languages. An error on a label can cause delays in the regulatory approval for a medicine, or worse, medication errors! Likewise, poorly translated patient information can lead to misunderstandings in clinical studies or invalid scientific results. In most professions, an error or typo has little impact on business criticality, but in life sciences and healthcare, a simple error can lead to a health hazard. The unforgiving demands for quality in life sciences call for highly qualified and knowledgeable medical translators.
Training Pays Off
Linguistics is a scientific discipline in its own right but translators will need to add some level of life science knowledge to their qualifications to manage the unique terminology within this profession. They will benefit from training in medical content types, their purposes and intended audiences in order to convey the meaning of a source text into the target language. In addition, it is very helpful for medical translators to have a basic familiarity with regulations and how medicines or medical devices are developed. Content types and regulatory procedures may impact translation workflows, timelines, review rounds and document updates, as for example within the linguistic review procedure for regulatory labelling in the EU. Sometimes it also pays off to train translators in specific diseases terminologies. Despite all these valid arguments, many translators are not offered even basic training by their life science clients and training academies are far too costly for a freelancer.
Close the Knowledge Gap
Sealion Consult embarked on a journey to develop such trainings intended for language professionals and other non-scientists who wish to learn more about life sciences. The intention is to build a library of trainings that are offered as affordable, OnDemand training sessions. These trainings offer knowledge without pricy faculty certifications but with focus on the subject matter.
Visit the training site for more information.
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