Your medical product must meet strict quality standards
You need a quality of translation to match. MediLingua can help.
You need a quality of translation to match. MediLingua can help.
There’s no room for error in healthcare translations. If a translation goes wrong, your regulatory submission is delayed or a patient is harmed. You may lose money. You may lose more than money.
That’s why you need complete confidence in the quality of translation that you receive. Our team has been fine-tuning a process to achieve this translation quality since 1996.
At MediLingua, we have spent 3 decades honing our craft. Here are 4 reasons why our quality of translation is not easily matched:
MediLingua is certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 17100. These certifications are the two stamps of approval that regulatory authorities look for, making our translations perfect for your regulatory submissions. Even so, we don’t believe in just meeting standards. We believe in surpassing them. That’s why we take our quality of translation even further.
At MediLingua, we’ve been the medical text people since 1996. That’s 28 years of being trusted by the biggest names in medical, pharma and dental.
Why do they trust us? Because we have the quality process to produce translations that are approved by regulatory authorities and respected by implantologists, healthcare professionals and patients.
Our project managers specialise in different areas of medical translation. So whether you’re in dental implants, clinical trials or medicines, they know your ecosystem inside out.
So submit your drug for regulatory approval. Or launch your new medical device. No matter what language your market speaks, you’re in safe hands with our expert project managers.
Depending on the project, your document is handled by up to 5 separate language specialists.
All these specialists are coordinated by our project managers. They stay on top of everything, from terminology management to communication to translator selection. That’s quite a few tasks off your plate. And a translation you can bank on.
Talk to us about your project.
Our quality control process is ISO-certified. This may be all you need to know. But if you’d like extra reassurance about the quality of translation we deliver, read on. And if you have questions, we’re here to help.
Quality is subjective. We all have our preferences. (Don’t be shy about communicating these, by the way.) But at MediLingua, 5 elements of translation quality are non-negotiable:
Consistency: The translation must be consistent as regards terminology, data and style. It must also be consistent with your previous documents and across languages.
Suitability: The translation must suit the needs of your target audience as well as your project aims.
Accuracy: The translation must mirror your original document as closely as possible.
Presentation: The translation must comply with the rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation, layout and abbreviations. The last thing you want is a silly mistake ruining all your hard work.
Process: A quality translation takes no shortcuts. Humans make mistakes. The simplest way to minimise mistakes is to follow a process.
The project manager analyses your document for problems that may interfere with translation. We do this pre-check because it’s easier to fix problems in the original text than in 26 translations. Once the pre-check is complete, the project manager selects an experienced medical translator. They give the translator a full brief, templates and glossaries. They also explain any specific requirements that you may have.
The translator translates your document. To do this, they draw on their skills in writing, editing, language, culture, and healthcare. They edit and proofread their translation for accuracy. If necessary, they liaise with the project manager about any aspects of the text they are unsure of. Then they send their translation to the project manager, who forwards it to a reviser.
The reviser is also an experienced medical translator. They read the translation sentence by sentence. They check that it mirrors your original document and suits the target audience. They make changes where necessary. Again, they liaise with the project manager if any issues remain unresolved.
A quality assurance (QA) specialist runs the revised translation through a detailed checklist. They focus on terms, numbers, dates, tables and cross-references. They make the translation as consistently excellent across languages as possible. Finally, they feed the translation through Xbench, our language quality assurance (LQA) tool. If the translation goes for desktop publishing, the QA specialist gives the translation one final check after it’s been formatted.
The project manager sends you a fully revised, quality-controlled translation. At this stage, some clients ask in-country users to review the terminology in the translation. If these in-country users flag any terms, the project manager makes the appropriate changes to the translation. The translation is now ready for regulatory authorities or in-country users.
Revision is a broad readthrough of the quality of the translation. The reviser checks that the translation mirrors the meaning of your original document. They verify that the style and terminology are appropriate for the reader (who may not be a healthcare professional). They watch for local differences in spelling or terminology. In other words, the reviser holds up the translation to your original document and asks “Does it mirror the original? Is it fit for purpose?”
Quality assurance (QA) is a detailed crosscheck. Our QA specialist team has a long list of questions to tick off. For example, are numbers and dates correct and consistent? Are fullstops and commas correctly used in numbers? Is the translation complete? Are tables of contents, headings, subheadings and cross-references consistent? Are layout and formatting correct? Are style guides, translation memories, termbases and client references followed? Lastly, the QA team runs the translation through a QA tool called Xbench.
Of course, our experienced medical translators check all these details anyway. Our revisers double-check them. So why ask the QA team to triple-check them? Because a simple mistake in a figure or a unit of measure is immediately obvious. You don’t want your hard work spoiled by a bad first impression, do you?
Project management and quality assurance are handled in-house. It’s much easier to communicate information this way. And it’s during these phases that we make the crucial decisions.
The translation and revision phases are handled by freelancers. Outsourcing these phases expands the range of languages, skills and knowledge that we can call on. Translation and revision are also the “quiet phases” of our process. Our freelance specialists appreciate having the time and space to carefully work through your document alone.
We verify that each translator has translation training and experience with medical content. We then carefully test them on short projects with flexible deadlines. This gives us time to revise the translation extra thoroughly. (Even translations by new translators must match the high standard of all MediLingua translations.) If the translator impresses us, we build them up to larger, more critical projects. Once they prove themselves as experienced medical translators, they become revisers.
Like our in-house teams, our freelancers tend to specialise in niches within medical translation. For example, they may be familiar with dental implants or clinical trials. A few of our translators and revisers have been with us since we founded MediLingua in 1996.