Significance of Medical Translation in Life Sciences

Every one of us wants to live a healthy life. We can perform daily activities of life efficiently if we are physically and mentally healthy. Unfortunately, third-world countries are not equipped with better health facilities. So many people go abroad to get the best treatment. If for any reason, they are unable to go, they send their medical reports to them. Different languages are spoken around the world. Therefore, in both cases, whether you are going abroad for seeking the best treatment or sending your documents, you face the problem due to differences in language. Here comes the requirement for medical document translation services. Document translation is very important in life sciences because it deals with the health of human life. Doctors and healthcare advisors cannot diagnose properly if they are unable to understand the language. Its repercussions can be errors in diagnosis, mistreatment, and even death.

What is Medical Translation?

The medical industry is very wide. It involves medical translation services for different life sciences industries such as healthcare, psychiatry, pharmacology, and many more. Knowing the significance of medical advisors in human health, many healthcare service providers take the assistance of proficient medical translators so that can provide the best health services to the patients. These translators provide medical translation services for patients’ records, pharma labels, prescriptions, and many more.

In a foreign country, if any patient needs to get admitted. They need to provide certain documents to the hospital authorities. These authorities go for life sciences translation services to know the chronic medical case of the patient. Moreover, in emergency cases, when doctors want permission from the patient’s family to undergo the critical procedure or they want permission to put a patient on a ventilator, they give a form to the relatives of the patient to sign. Here the professional life sciences translation services are of great help because the patient’s family can sign the form if it is provided to them in the language that they understand. It is a very critical situation because in this case, miscommunication can lead to death.

The other critical scenario is when the medical staff is unable to use medical equipment to diagnose the lethal disease. This situation comes when instructions on the medical device are written in another language.  To mitigate the communication barrier, people that are in the business of medical devices should go for business translation services. So that medical staff can understand the usage of the equipment and hospital authorities can use the medical device to treat the patients well.

No Room for Errors

The accuracy in medical translation is very important as any minor error can take a precious human life. One of the challenging parts of medical translation is the translation of abbreviations. To solve this challenge, many translation agencies give translation projects to translators that are subject-matter-expert in their field and who have prior experience in the medical field.

Risks Associated with improper Medical Translation

The medical translation should be precise and accurate. It should allow effective communication among healthcare stakeholders. Failure to do so can affect the well-being of the patient and question the competency of medical doctors. Risks associated with improper medical translation are as follows.

• Resulting in providing the wrong treatment to patients that cause death.
• Unable to provide state-of-the-art health care services to patients that came from abroad.
• Delay in diagnosis makes the disease fatal.  
• Litigation problems, if patients are unable to understand the consent forms.
• Mis-communication due to inaccurate translation.

Things to Keep in Mind for Getting Quality Medical Translations

As human life depends upon medical translations so you should be very careful in selecting a professional medical translator.

Understanding the Basic Communication Right

The medical translator should have extensive knowledge about his domain. Apart from subject knowledge, he should also be aware of cultural and linguistic barriers according to the target market.

Continuous Upgrading of the Knowledge

The medical translator has to translate different types of content such as medical reports, pharma labels, clinical trials, and medical journals. Lots of research and development are done in the medical field. Because of clinical trials, new treatments and medicines are introduced in the market every year. Therefore, medical translators should keep on upgrading their medical knowledge to avoid any type of error.

Comply with International Standards

Medical translators should comply with international certificates like ISO 9001 and ISO 13485. ISO 13487 is the quality management system for medical devices. It makes sure that medical devices and related services should meet the applicable regulatory requirements. Another certification is 15038. It is the vendor quality interpretation imposed by the European Union. Proficient medical translators comply with medical regulatory laws across the globe.

Wrapping Up

When medical material is in a different language then translating them accurately is very important. It becomes more important for doctors to understand the patient’s medical history and medical conditions so that they can diagnose the disease and start the treatment on time. On the other hand, it is imperative for patients to understand the treatment that the doctor is prescribing to them. For this, you must hire a professional translation agency. They have a team of native medical translators who are hired after strict scrutiny. Therefore they provide seamless medical translation whether it is in the form of documents, reports, or leaflets.