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28 Apr Why trust a medical translation agency?

One mistake can change everything. If we are also talking about a medical translation, then special care must be taken. It’s your health that is at stake. Therefore, it is not worth the risk and the best option is to rely on translators who are familiar with medical terminology and who know how to deal with these texts. In this article we advise you on what factors to take into account when hiring a service of this type. Don’t leave your medical translations to chance and read on.

Medicine means health, and health means life. So – keeping this important idea in mind – the title of this article could also have been “Why not to trust a medical translation agency?”. Quality is essential. Medical translation field requires further attention to details, even much more than any other kind of translation. Remind that is critical to put someone’s life in the right hands.

A specialized medical translation agency, such as Okomeds, takes care of any detail and focus on perfection. The aim is not to take unnecessary risks which might lie on the translated text. A good medical translation is a life insurance.

Here are some points for reinforcing the idea of trusting an experienced medical translation agency.

– Accuracy: a specialized text should always provide truthfulness, precision, and clarity. Accuracy and objectiveness are needed both for specialized words and sentences.

– Knowledge: a medical translator should know, understand, and be familiarised with all the features of the target text. Otherwise, a mistranslation would endanger lives.

– Professionalism: avoid unnecessary mistakes and perform a professional work. Consequences of a bad medical translation could be a catastrophe.

– Process: a medical translation agency works in a detailed process aiming high quality. Translation and proofreading are not the only values taken into account.

– Specialization: not just a good translator neither a specialized doctor could be the one required for a medical translation. The right translator should feature these two characteristics: both a translation experience and a high medical knowledge. That is the key for specialization.

– Life: last, but not least. This post started indicating that medicine means health, and health means life. According to the syllogism, medicine should never take unnecessary risks as life is at stake. Medical translation plays an essential role and becomes a very important element for consideration.

Why hire a medical translation agency?

It is well known that medical translations are controversial. On the one hand, some argue that they should be done by doctors who have linguistic knowledge, while on the other hand, there are many in favour of having them done by a translator who specialises in medical texts.

It is true that doctors have much broader knowledge of the medical field than translators. However, a translator specialising in health sciences can translate a clinical trial perfectly well without needing to know how to perform open-heart surgery in an operating theatre.

The most important thing, of course, is to have the right skills to do this job. And for this, training is essential.

Finding the right person to translate your medical documents into other languages is not easy. It involves a great deal of responsibility, which is why it is essential to use native translators specialising in health sciences. It is also important for a good result that communication between the client and the expert is fluid, and that deadlines are established and respected.

On the other hand, we must be sure that quality controls are complied with. Rigorously checking a medical translation is crucial. In fact, some medical translation agencies offer revisions of a single text carried out by different translators. This is a great idea that acts as a filter for possible errors. Moreover, applying this double proofreading technique generates security and confidence in the result. It is undoubtedly one of the best options for effective quality control.

It is also important to guarantee the protection of the data contained in these texts. Given that in most cases we are dealing with confidential or sensitive data, no one should have access to them without the express consent of the client.