Medical Translation

24/04/2023

In its new issue, the trade magazine Healthcare Marketing publishes an article on the current state of medical translation in view of the far-reaching changes resulting from digitalisation and artificial intelligence and in view of increasingly complex and diverse communications. The article includes an interview with Andrea Modersohn, director of oneword. We share the essentials.

“Especially in medicine and medical technology, precise and unambiguous communication with all stakeholders is indispensable and represents a major challenge for global players. Making medical information available in all languages is a highly sensitive task. Within medical translation as a translation discipline, international brand communication and the dissemination of comprehensive information material also play an important role,” writes Healthcare Marketing (only available in German) in the introduction to the article. The demand for specialised translations for the health, pharmaceutical and medical technology industries is unwavering and varied. The reason for this, according to the specialist magazine, is that content to be translated has to take three factors into account: legal and regulatory developments in different markets, changing consumer expectations and constant innovation.

Then it gives a coherent diagnosis: “The market of language services for medical-pharmaceutical translations is complex, especially in times of digitalisation, when texts can supposedly be transferred into several languages easily, in just a few clicks or by asking artificial intelligence to do it.” Digitalisation has long since changed the translation industry, the trade magazine continues. And this applies not only to the craft of translation as such, but also very significantly to the type and variety of content that medical translation specialists have to work on today. Therefore, digital content, such as website content, newsletters and social media posts, and even medical foreign language SEO, is increasingly joining the tasks required. The publication also mentions that translating communications in a way that is optimised to the target group is also linguistically challenging, for example when it comes to gender-conscious and inclusive language. Barrier-free communication for people with hearing or visual impairments is also becoming increasingly important.

For the article, Healthcare Marketing interviewed five language service providers with relevant expertise and asked them questions “that are a hot topic, not only in the medical translation world”. One of the experts interviewed is oneword founder and director Andrea Modersohn.

What do you think about the development of the medical translation market?

“Medical technology and life sciences are growing industries. This means that the need for professional and high-quality specialised translations is also increasing. In turn, this also brings us to machine translation: many companies are asking themselves whether the results are good enough for medical translation, which is a sensitive field.”

How important is digitalisation in translation in general and specifically for you and your teams in your day-to-day work?

“Digitalisation has been a key topic in the translation industry for a long time, with translation memory systems, process automation, and now machine translation and AI. We see technical innovation as an absolute asset and not as a threat to our industry and we are happy to provide support and progress in this area.”

The proportion of digital content that is translated is growing continuously. What are the biggest pitfalls in translating website content, newsletters and social media posts, and how can they be avoided?

“In addition to having a fine feeling for language, cultural knowledge about the target countries is what counts when translating advertising copy. The message and effect of the text should be retained, but the text should be optimally adapted to the target market. This applies not only to language conventions but also to image motifs, colours and idioms etc.
At the same time, more and more data is being created in less and less time, so translations also come with a time and cost factor. The solution lies in professional language services such as transcreation and post-editing machine translation.”

Website localisation also involves medical foreign-language SEO. To what extent do the target regions’ cultural characteristics play a role in the translation process? For example, where are there significant differences in the relevance of keywords?

“A good SEO translation is a prerequisite for worldwide visibility, in the field of professional medical translations, too. Keywords cannot simply be translated. They must be researched for each target country and target group and then used correctly in the translations.
Often, however, traditional SEO agencies only have a great deal of expertise in their home market, which is why it is always best for native-speaking SEO experts to do international SEO.”

The hype around tools like ChatGPT is not dying down. Currently, it is perhaps the most exciting discussion going on in the industry: what are the opportunities and risks of using AI in medical translation? How great is the revolutionary potential of these types of technologies in the sector?

“Machine translation, or MT, has been a big topic since 2016 and is now firmly established. For medical translations, higher criteria should be met to use it, because errors are particularly risky. After all, all MT systems currently still make mistakes, but some of them are very subtle. Machine translation & post-editing, MTPE for short, combines the best of both worlds: the speed of the machine with the intellect of the human being. Machine pre-translations are checked and corrected by post-editors so that the result still resembles a human translation at a lower cost and with a faster throughput. What applies to ChatGPT also applies to MT: it is absolutely profitable as an additional tool, but only if it is combined with human verification.”

How important are gender-specific communications in your industry? How linguistically challenging is it to translate communications in a way that is optimised to the target group, in terms of using gender-conscious and inclusive language?

“For some it is absolutely essential, for others it is an embellishment. At oneword, we have been using ‘gendering’ in all our texts for a long time. In foreign languages, just like in German, there are few or no guidelines or standards. So, basically, each company has to decide.”

The interview is published as part of the article “Medical Translation: The World Between Languages”, which appeared in Healthcare Marketing Print Issue 4/2023. The issue is available by subscription or as an individual order (only available in German) from the publisher.

Do you need professional, secure and high-quality translations in medical or medical-technical communication? Then talk to us. Our medical translation experts will be happy to advise you on measures and options.