Technical/Medical Translation

TECHNICAL TRANSLATION

(Technical Translation You Can Trust)

When translating technical documents it's essential that all the terminologies is translated correctly. Taken to an extreme, technical translation can literally be the difference between life and death. We know that sounds a bit dramatic, but imagine if a slight misinterpretation in an installation manual meant that wires were connected incorrectly.

That's why it's absolutely necessary that the translators working on your document have proven expertise in your field.

Finding the right technical name for train parts can be a daunting task even for a translator with an engineering background. Why? Because a current collector in electrical engineering becomes a pantograph in railway parlance.

A translator may boast of excellent language and engineering skills, but would be literally at a loss for words, unless they are familiar with technical jargon in both languages.

• Have translated at least 100,000 words

• Have at least two references for previous projects

• Only translate into their native language

• Be appropriately qualified in their technical areas

• Have working industry experience for the material they translate

• We only use qualified, experienced translators

10 Tips for getting your documents ready for translation

Getting your document ready for translation can be a tricky business. So, to help you, we have put together a list of 10 things you may want to consider when creating a document you want translated. These will help you get the most from our document translation service.

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MEDICAL TRANSLATION

(Medical and Pharmaceutical Translation)

Medical and Pharmaceutical translation is a highly specialized discipline and should only ever be carried out by suitably qualified translators.

That’s why we only ever use specialist translators who are doctors or biomedical engineers, have experience in your particular medical field and have language degrees. These translators are extremely highly vetted and quality controlled.

Why do we use only medically qualified translators for medical translations?

Knowing a foreign language alone is simply not enough. The plain truth of translation is that a text must be understood before it can be translated. We are all confident of our knowledge of English, aren’t we? Let us take a small self-test by considering two short sentences sourced from a medical text:

Tympanites and atony of the gastro-intestinal tract are often the first indications of parenteral nutrition, necessitated due to faulty utilisation of oral feeds.

Distention of the congested intestinal layers is possibly a contributory cause of blocked anastamosis or its dehiscence.

Honestly, how much of that did you understand? How easy was it to read? You can speak English ok, but understanding a medical text is a very different matter.

You can now see how a translator without a scientific or medical background would feel when faced with this text. Translators translate from a foreign language into their mother tongue. In other words, a translator should ideally be a native speaker of the language he/she is translating into. Somebody may possess excellent bi-lingual skills, but hiring him/her as a translator is a sure-fire recipe for disaster in translation, unless he/she is also an expert in his/her field.

Style, we all know, is the way in which something is said, done, expressed, or performed. Have we ever observed that scientific-technical writing has its own style? To illustrate the point, let us take a concrete example. Faithful to the style of the source language, a translation would read:

Owing to improvements in medical first-aid and rescue services, a steadily increasing number of severely injured accident victims reach clinics in a condition in which intensive therapy may be started.

After correction for style by a qualified subject and language expert, the same sentence would read:

Advancements in medical first-aid and rescue services have made it possible to immediately administer intensive care to an increasing number of severe cases of accident victims who are brought to hospitals.