26 Jul The main IT resources for healthcare translations

Several specifications and challenges can feature in a localisation project, like references, term lists, a big team with a large workload or tight deadlines. Because of this, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools are the best allies when handling medical translation workflows.

First, they help the management team organise assignments and monitor the vendors’ progress. They also assist translators and editors with many useful features (like terminology management, spellcheck, search options, shortcuts, etc.).

1. Medical translation memories (TMs)

TMs are bilingual databases that store pairs of translated segments (source + target text). They are integrated into CAT tools, so linguists can reuse previous translations and save the new ones. First, this speeds up the process of writing. Second, it’s the basic resource for ensuring consistency within documents and projects.

2. Term bases (TB)

A TB is a database containing pairs of terms (words or expressions) in two or more languages. TBs can be created or edited using the CAT tool in an ongoing project. In addition, it’s possible to create a TB by importing an existing list of terms from a bilingual or multilingual document (like an Excel sheet).

3. Alignment

This is a feature of CAT tools that allows pre-existing translations to be imported. The software automatically aligns the segments in a pair of files (the source text and its translation) to create a bilingual document. This way, linguists can have access to these translations, reuse them or store them in a TM. Therefore, the information in the document (terminology, references) is easily accessible to the linguists working on the project, as with any other CAT tool resource.

Alignment is an effective way of handling previous translations sent as reference because it means they can be imported into the tool. This way, the processing of this information and consistency with it can be guaranteed.