FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I'm in biomedical research, on a none-too-generous grant, and I need to publish my paper in English: how can I reduce my translation costs?

• Select your target journal and ensure that your manuscript complies scrupulously not only with all its instructions to authors, but also with its typological conventions (e.g. P, P , p or p , etc).
• Format your document using basic word-processing commands (Page Setup, Styles, Paragraph Keep With Next, Bullets & Numbering, etc). This avoids the translator having to spend a couple of hours at your expense reformatting your document before he or she can work within it.
• Check your list of references from source and include it in your manuscript. Fax the full text of any reference on which your manuscript relies heavily, especially if it has not appeared in a readily accessible journal from a readily accessible year.
• Include all figures and tables: these can help resolve queries.
• Write your manuscript in English if you feel comfortable expressing your thoughts in the language. This may enable us to select a named non-linguist editor, possibly from your own field, who might provide useful pre-referee input. If your English is good, requiring minimal correction, your costs will be substantially reduced and we will be able to turn your document around more quickly. Be warned, however, that texts in not-so-good English can take as long to revise as - and even longer than - translating from scratch.
• If submitting your paper in English, or if requesting editing in addition to translation (‘transediting'), agree a budget with us. Manuscript revision is notoriously time-consuming, indeed potentially limitless. Even native speakers working in their own specialty produce a dozen drafts before getting their paper right. No such luxury is possible in this case, on either our side or yours: 8 hours are probably adequate for essential revision on an average-length paper.

 

I work in the pharmaceutical industry: How can I reduce my translation costs?

• If your text is an electronic file, and you want the same presentation in the translation, ensure that your document is formatted using basic word-processing commands (Page Setup, Styles, Paragraph Keep With Next, Bullets & Numbering, Table of Contents etc). This avoids the translator having to spend a couple of hours at your expense reformatting your document before he or she can work within it.
• Strike out/clearly mark sections that do not require translating, e.g. small-print headers and footers, numerical tabular material, literature references and passages of duplicate text.
• Tell us what the translation is for, if not obvious from the context. Do you want a literal translation of the original for information purposes, or do you want a piece of native-speaker English for consumption by American physicians? This will save the translator time in settling on a style, and provide you with a more appropriate product.
• If the text for translation is a paper targeted at a specific journal, read through our answers to Q1.

 

Why can't we run our text through a machine translation program?

•  Many well-informed people are surprised to discover, given the profusion of electronic dictionaries and phrase books, and the inexorable nature of digital advance generally, that machine translation software for the type of texts handled by Lingua Medicus is still in its infancy.

•  A very rough idea can be gained by clicking on the ‘Translate' option in a web browser. The result is a text which for information purposes can be useful to someone unfamiliar with the source language, especially if it deals with a field in which they have specialist knowledge. But it is far from having walk-away functionality. It cannot be put to use, e.g. published in a journal or under the company imprint, without detailed input from someone with linguistic skills and, often, knowledge of the subject matter.

•  In practice, despite the seconds taken to produce the translation and the outlay of only for instance €500 for better-performing software, it remains faster, simpler and cheaper to use human translators for such documents.

 

Is there no circumstance in which you could recommend an agency?

•  Agencies are particularly useful for multilingual projects where the translation of a document or set of documents into a dozen languages is primarily an administrative requirement, i.e. where the quality control aspect is conveniently swamped in administrative complexity. Agencies maintain registers and databases that allow them to offer ‘medical translation' between a wide variety of language pairs. The unspoken assumption underlying such assignments is that if it were ever to come to the crunch, quality control is the client's responsibility, not the agency's. Common sense indicates that an agency cannot in good faith claim quality control over such material except in terms of general presentation.

 

Is it necessary to be medically qualified to be a good medical translator?

•  No, provided the translator is aware of his/her limitations. A substantial proportion of medical translation deals with basic research, pharmaceutics, pharmacology, laboratory devices, i.e. areas for which a medical training provides no specific preparation and in which MDs in turn need to be aware of their limitations unless they happen to have acquired the relevant experience. Otherwise such fields are best tackled by bioscientists or pharmacists.

•  However, there is no doubt that a medical training followed by several years of clinical and laboratory experience, preferably including medical authorship, is a huge asset for a medical translator, in terms of both confidence and range. It is indispensable for highly clinical texts, e.g. discharge summaries and adverse event reports, often dictated by exhausted junior hospital doctors and typed by inadequately trained temps, which can be a minefield for anyone without the relevant clinical and linguistic background. It is, or at least should be, unethical for a pharmaceutical company to entrust such material to translators lacking demonstrable clinical knowledge and experience. Operative surgery is another field in which clarity, accuracy and authority are virtually impossible to achieve without an MD background allied to experience in the specialty concerned or, failing that, without close cooperation between a medically qualified translator and an operative specialist.