06 Nov Developing a GILT strategy for a medical translator

Posted by - Rubén

GILT stands for Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation. In medical and healthcare translation it is essential for a company to carefully develop a GILT strategy in order to offer a high-quality service.

If a healthcare company is planning to sell a product abroad, those are the steps that should be followed. A medical translator has a main role in the last two stages of a GILT process.

Globalization

Globalization is the initial strategy for selling a product. Before translating, the healthcare company has to work on other crucial aspects related to sales as marketing or customer support. All these ideas should be previously clarified before continuing to the following stage.

Internationalization

Where does the health company want to sell its product? In which countries? This stage prepares the translation project and handles multiples languages and cultural conversions, but also establishes the foundations of translation and localization.

Localization

It is mainly a conversion and adaptation process in medical translation. Apart from specific dialects of any language – as Spanish in Mexico vs. Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Brazil vs. Portuguese in Portugal, English in the United Kingdom vs. English in the United States – there are other main aspects which must be taken into account as date formats, metric systems or even vocabulary. A professional medical translator must be aware of these ideas for creating a target text according to its public.

Translation

Translation is the process of expressing the same ideas of a written document into a different language. The target text – which must be natural and avoid misleading – should be carried out by a professional and native medical translator with an advanced knowledge of such specialization area.

A good GILT strategy assures accuracy and consistence to the process, where the medical translator participates in the final steps. If it is carefully prepared, it will provide a successful result.