One Hour Translation Blog

The world functions as a global arena where information is literally passing us by in what is known as the information superhighway. All manner of material is transmitted including important medical information. In this manner, it is imperative that the correct information is relayed to doctors, patients and other vested interests. And it becomes essential that the correct translation of medical terms is undertaken to avoid potentially fatal errors.

The issue of translation services crops up every time information is relayed across different geographic, linguistic or cultural lines. And it becomes vitally important that the messages being relayed from the sender … Continue Reading

Medical and healthcare industry is one of the most regulated industries through out the world as it involves health and life of common people. Any unbridled growth can spell doom for the society as a whole. Since medical translation of labels, dosage instructions etc. is also part of the drug manufacturing and marketing process, they are also subject to regulatory requirements regarding accuracy, completeness etc.

Labels in medicine bottles contain diverse information like dosage, storage instruction, side effects, warnings, frequency of use, expiry date etc. When these medicines are sold in a multilingual market like the European Union, they need … Continue Reading

Medical translation offers a wide gamut of opportunities right from translating medical reports, scientific papers, to labelling in pharmaceuticals, in clinical trials etc. that comply with various country specific regulatory requirements. One of the opportunities that has been growing of late is translating informed consent forms (ICF).

Clinical trial of newly discovered drugs has become a global business. With many non English speaking participants coming into the picture, drug companies particularly from US have to comply with FDA regulations of explaining the pros and cons of a clinical trial in the native language of the participants before undertaking it. FDA … Continue Reading

As noted in a previous blog, medical translation requires specialized knowledge in addition to proficiency in the language pair to be translated. One of the problems faced by medical translators is the free use of abbreviations and acronyms in the field of medicine. They are defined differently in various dictionaries and scientific literature. A commonly used definition of acronyms and abbreviations is given below.

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase used for convenience and is spelled differently depending on language. It is mostly expressed in small letters. An acronym is a word created from the … Continue Reading

Medicine is one of the oldest branches of science and has been in existence since time immemorial. Ancient Egyptian medicine, Babylonian medicine, Indian Ayurvedic medicine, classical Chinese medicine etc. trace their origins to as early as 3rd millennium B.C. Translation of medical terminology is also very old, one of the earliest organized effort being that of Toledo School of Translation established by Archbishop Raimundus (1125-1152 AD).

Medical translation involves specialist knowledge and medical translators need to have advanced degrees in medicine apart from a flair for language. Medicine involves many … Continue Reading

A medical translator is typically very straightforward when it comes to going about his human translation work. To be more precise, medical translation is a lot less labor-intensive than legal translation or literary translation because its target audience, the patients, requires comprehensibility of the end product more than stringent accurateness. Well-to-do hospitals seeking to attend to a more multicultural consumer base tend to opt for established professional translation agencies instead of freelance translation service providers … Continue Reading

Translation is a very broad field of activity. Apart from innumerable language pairs that translations involve, there are also very many topics that the source text refers to that needs to be translated into a target language. However, translation can be broadly classified into 3 categories: commercial translation, technical translation and literary translation. We discuss these categories in more detail here below.

Commercial translation is probably the most common type of translation that translators are engaged in. Whether it is lawyers, engineers, accountants, or doctors to name a few professions all have requirement for translation some time or … Continue Reading

Technical documents today travel between countries and continents due to the out sourcing phenomena. Medical prescriptions or legal transcripts written in Europe or America are read and worked on in Asia or South America. With differing languages everywhere, documents tend to be written in different languages as well. Hence when a document written in Germany in German, needs to be read by a person in India or there may be a service provider who has prepared a technical write up for a client in his native language or … Continue Reading

Medical translation services today have interestingly become globalised. One may wonder how this exactly works, but the explanation is quite simple. Several services happen across the world. Patients may travel to other parts of the world for cheaper medical care or doctors in countries like America or in Europe send medical documents to other countries for preparation of medical reports. The outsourcing of medical documentation and other work has made medicine a globally linked industry. Today doctors from across the continent work in unison to treat cases.

A Hospital in Argentina might seek the medical assistance of … Continue Reading