By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Medical translation is becoming more and more of an important area in the translation industry. Besides technology and other sciences, medicine is one of the fields that includes a fair amount of cultural exchange. This means that developments that are made in one country can impact the whole field and need to be made accessible to everyone as soon as possible. Cuba and Israel are good examples of countries that are breaking medical ground and sharing their findings with the world.
This is where medical translators step in and do their part, which brings us to the first important fact about medical translation:
1. Bilingual medical professionals do not count as medical translators
This may seem like the easy way out in terms of money and other resources, but being bilingual and a professional does not make someone a translator. It takes much more than that to be a professional translator in any field, and the added training and certification of specific medical translation to be a medical translator that someone would hire. Besides knowing how to translate, medical translators need to have a good knowledge of medicine and medical terms in order to properly translate any given text. Bilingual medical staff could easily make linguistic mistakes and cause major problems.
2. Medical translation and medical interpreting are not the same thing
Many times, when you do a search for information on medical translation, pages will also come up that deal with medical interpreting. They are both related, but translating and interpreting are two different fields. Translation focuses on the written word and requires a different kind of training, whereas interpreting is based on listening and speaking. The two require different skillsets. Translators can take their time in figuring out what to write and refer to dictionaries and other resources. Interpreters can refer to dictionaries, but they have to make spur-of-the-moment decisions about how to render something into the other language.
3. This field is one of the most dangerous in terms of the results of mistranslation
With other translation fields, a translation mistake here and there might make the message a little bit less clear, but generally doesn’t result in any harm other than perhaps a company losing a little money. Medical translation, however, is one of those fields where an error in translation can mean someone doesn’t get the treatment they were supposed to get, or doctors in one country don’t understand exactly how to put a prosthetic limb from another country together.
4. Not every medical text will be translated by a translator specialized in medical translation
Unfortunately, the demand for medical translators is much higher than the actual number of certified medical translators. This means that sometimes, medical translations will be done by medical staff with a high level of fluency in the language but no real training in translation, or translators who have a lot of experience translating but not as much translating medical documents. To make sure you don’t end up with someone who isn’t fit for the task, search around for an experienced and certified medical translator and work exclusively with them.