Medical translation Services and Pitfalls

Medical translation Services

For the last decades, the demand for medical translation services has significantly risen, but the number of qualified specialists is catastrophically small – and here is why. Medical translation is especially important as it directly concerns the life and health of a person. One small mistake – and the therapy course may get into the wrong direction. Translators not only are afraid of taking this responsibility, but also do not have enough knowledge and skills to work with medical documents.

To make the high quality medical translation, a translator has to be highly proficient in the medical sphere. Ideally, to fully understand the contents of the source language document and translate it correctly into the target language, he or she should major in both medicine and linguistics.

Medical record translation: why people need it?

Not everyone needs their medical history translated. However, if somebody is going to receive treatment or any other kind of medical help abroad, this issue becomes very important. The medical record may also be required while buying insurance in foreign or international companies. Actually, it is the most laborious and difficult process in the medical translation sphere, as it implies translating the whole medical history, including procedural records, test and examination results, such as X-rays, MRI, CT scan etc.

Sometimes translators also have to deal with applications to foreign clinics, e.g. translating inquiries about the possibility to do a certain surgery or type of specific treatment. In this case, the clinics may require only some parts of medical record which concern just the specified problem or disease.

Pitfalls of procedural translation

There are many kinds of procedural documents, from test results to surgery reports, and all of them have lots of traps for translators. First, a person who deals with such documents has to remember that they are frequently created according to strict rules, and sometimes the layout and contents of such documents are defined by laws – and in different countries they may differ.

Then, various countries may use different units to present the test results, and this is not just about the metric and imperial systems, but also about the local medical traditions in each country. There are still debates between scholars whether translators have to convert the units or just leave them as they are. However, the practice shows that patients ask about converting the units so that foreign doctors can figure out the test results. That means that to make correct conversions, medical translators also need to be proficient in chemistry and physics.

Terms and abbreviations: worst enemies

Documents from the medical sphere have the biggest density of terms which can even gather into long synonymic groups. A translator has to understand all the terms in the source text and find their correct correspondences in the target language. In addition, proficiency in terms of Latin and Greek origin is essential for a person performing the medical translation.

Another factor that creates difficulties is constant development of medicine and, eventually, the steady arising of new terms. For example, the number of oncology terms up to date is around 35,000 and growing, marking the development of this branch of medicine.

Next, the already mentioned differences in medical traditions of different countries may be quite problematic for the translator, as classification of human organs and body systems may differ. For example, what is considered one organ in one language may be two different organs in another, or completely not be specified as an organ.

Translating abbreviations is also a hard game. Doctors use thousands of abbreviations to denote medical procedures, diseases, pathogens or medications. What is worse, same abbreviations may have different meanings in different medical spheres. A good translator has to make out the meaning of the abbreviation from the context and give its full form in the translated text.