A difficult and important discipline, medical translation requires perfect accuracy to prevent sometimes catastrophic mistakes. Translation of medical papers, including patient records, informed consent forms, and more, is becoming more widespread with the globalization of healthcare and growing patient mobility throughout the world.
Medical terminology and concepts, however, do not flow naturally across one language to another. Moreover, if not well considered, little cultural subtleties could affect understanding. Medical translating therefore requires the best degrees of accuracy and subject knowledge to guarantee patient safety and quality of treatment. For companies and healthcare practitioners, even little language mistakes might cause medical errors or liability problems.
This article will analyze the common challenges in medical translation, illustrate the dire need for precision in this field with real-world examples, and provide best practices for ensuring and maintaining accuracy.
Key Challenges in Medical Translation
A medical document translation has unique challenges that set it apart from other translation specialties. These key issues must be addressed to enable accurate communication of health and medical information.
Specialized Terminology and Ontologies
Medical language is full of discipline specific terminology, such as anatomic and physiologic terms, disease names, pharmaceutical drug names, medical device components, diagnostic procedures, etc. In addition, these terms may have very slight different meanings or be used differently in a given context.
Correct identification and transparent accurate translation of these terms requires translators to have extremely good command of the medical ontologies (in both source language and target language).
Nuanced Cultural Factors
Understanding of medical knowledge may be much influenced by cultural standards, attitudes, and beliefs about health, medicine, and the human body. Most importantly is cultural awareness.
For instance, certain Asian societies’ color symbolism around illness has to be changed to fit Western patients so as to prevent uncertainty. To create clearly comprehensible translations, translators must grasp these minute cultural quirks.
High Consequence of Inaccuracy
Mistranslation of medical documents can lead to misdiagnoses, incorrect treatments, unintended surgical procedures, unanticipated drug reactions, and more adverse outcomes. And the stakes are often life-or-death situations.
The extreme risk associated with inaccuracies or lack of precision in medical translation necessitates stringent quality assurance measures, such as back translation and cross-checking against source content.
Regulatory & Legal Requirements
Laws and rules controlling private patient health information, clinical trials, medical equipment standards, and more must all be followed in medical translation. For instance, the standardizing of terminology among all languages guarantees the integrity of data from worldwide multi-site clinical studies.
Compliance is really important. Mistranslation can cause document rejection, legal problems, and non-compliance with regional regulatory authorities.
Real-World Impacts of Medical Translation Errors
To demonstrate the tremendous need for precision in medical translations, it is illustrative to highlight real-world examples of translation inaccuracies that have had detrimental impacts on patient health and safety.
Misdiagnosis & Mistreatment
Attending a high school athletic event, a Florida youngster started feeling ill. “Me siento intoxicado,” he said to his lover before passing out. The girlfriend, who spoke little English, repeated inebriated when the paramedics arrived, which the minimal Spanish-speaking paramedics took as “intoxicated.”
The youngster was seen for substance abuse treatment in the ER they took him. However, the hospital personnel conducted a CT scan following the 48-hour coma of the lad and found that his skull had flooded with blood. As it happens, intoxicated may also refer to “sick to the stomach,” a sign of a brain aneurysm. A $71-million-dollar malpractice lawsuit followed from this communication failure.
In other cases, inaccurate medical translations have led to delayed cancer diagnoses, patients receiving contraindicated medications they were allergic to, unnecessary surgeries, and more. Even basic screening test results can be misinterpreted without proper translation.
Medical Device Hazards
When medical device manuals or labels are mistranslated – whether in printed manuals or embedded device software – the risk of device malfunctions, user errors, and patient injuries increases.
In one case, mistakes in radiation treatment in France connected in part to untranslated English manuals, which led to overdose and incidents where multilingual equipment labels or software UIs failed to communicate important instructions adequately, therefore compromising compliance and safety.
Best Practices for Precision in Medical Translation
Strict procedures and thorough quality assurance techniques have to be followed to guarantee optimum correctness considering the great responsibility involved in translating medical material. These are the best approaches for maximizing and verifying accuracy.
Recruit Specialized Medical Translators
Human translators with subject matter expertise are indispensable for medical translations. Qualified medical translators should have the following:
- Fluency in both the source and target languages.
- Formal training in medical translation.
- First-hand experience in healthcare or biomedicine.
- Use knowledge of relevant medical devices & technologies.
- Membership in professional translation & medical associations.
Ideally, target market experience is also beneficial (e.g., translators based in-country). Machine translation alone often fails to capture the nuances required for medical content.
Always Compare Against Source Material
Back translation, the process of translating content back into its original language, is extremely useful for validating the accuracy of medical document translations.
By comparing a back-translated version against the original document, subtle discrepancies in terminology and phrasing can be identified and rectified. External reviews by other qualified medical translators also help surface any issues or uncertainties.
Standardize and Maintain Terminology Databases
Centralized terminology management is key for aligning medical vocabulary across multiple languages and preventing conflicting lexicon use.
Stringent terminology protocols should mandate that translators use approved glossaries and databases so that the most accurate equivalent terms are always applied. These resources require ongoing maintenance and review from domain experts to stay current.
Adapt to Cultural Contexts
Besides linguistic translation, medical content needs to be adjusted to the cultural norms of a target population of patients in order to be comprehensible, relevant and sensitive.
They should be locals or have a lot of in country experience to understand the nuances of cultural perspectives around health conditions, terminology, imagery, data privacy, informed consent, etc.
Secure Regulatory and Legal Compliance
From the onset, medical translation projects should evaluate all relevant laws, regulations, ethical codes, and compliance standards applicable to the content and target region(s).
For example, translations of patient records must comply with local health confidentiality laws, while translated medical device specifications need to meet regional regulatory directives. Staying compliant is mandatory.
Conclusion
Cross border patient care and global medical research collaboration will only make medical translation accuracy and reliability more important. Bad and bad badly translated risk patient safety and care quality.
Specialized medical translators, terminology control and regulatory compliance can help medical organizations meet with the precision demanded by health communication.
In the end, the precision is drilled into, and it saves lives by closing the comprehension gaps and errors across languages. With healthcare access expanding everywhere, accuracy of medical translation still has to be a top priority.
