Medicine/Healthcare
Translations
Improving communication and patient care...
In today's healthcare world, effective communication
can be vital to proper treatment and patient health. Bridging
language and cultural barriers between providers is crucial for
medical services. As cities become more diverse, health care providers
face growing challenges to ensure that patients with limited English
proficiency (or with no proficiency) receive adequate assistance.
TLS Translations offers comprehensive foreign language services
to assist providers in such efforts.
Our professional linguists have both substantive expertise and
practical training in the healthcare field. Our Associates have
studied and taught in medical institutions and translated various
healthcare publications and video documentaries, as well as handled
Web site translation for multinational medical entities throughout
the world. These linguists have further served as medical interpreters
and provided proofreading services for physicians who publish
and lecture at International Congresses and Conferences. Additionally,
they have extensive international experience translating for hospital
physicians practicing in a wide range of specialties. In applying
quality control measures on each assignment, TLS Associates and
project managers are careful to ensure that our work is appropriate
culturally as well as linguistically.
Serving the community...
TLS Translations can assist in ensuring that healthcare entities
provide meaningful access to programs and services, in compliance
with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By helping to assess
the language needs of the institution, developing effective interpretation
and translation policies, and offering customized staff training,
TLS can serve as a key resource in your compliance initiatives.
We welcome the opportunity to work with you in serving your community.
Our specialized healthcare services include the following:
Translation of Healthcare Materials
TLS can translate a wide array of documents such as medical
records, patient forms, physician correspondence, educational
literature, and hospital policies and procedures. Medical terminology
has its own extensive, unique vocabulary. Terms do not translate
in a literal sense. Precision in meaning is critical for the proper
application of materials in each specific market, not only for
general health and safety, but to increase acceptance and lower
liability claims.
All healthcare translations with legal content not only has a
linguist assigned with subject matter experience, many will also
have a background in law to compliment their medical experience
as well. This ensures the legal meaning and intent of your original
document is maintained.
Medical and Pharmaceutical translation is a highly-specialized
discipline and should only ever be carried out by suitably qualified
translators.
Why do we use only medically qualified translators for
medical translations? Knowing a foreign language alone
is simply not enough. The plain truth of translation is that a
text must be understood before it can be translated. We are all
confident of our knowledge of English, aren’t we?
Let us take a small self-test by considering two short sentences
sourced from a medical text:
Tympanites and atony of the gastro-intestinal tract are
often the first indications of parenteral nutrition, necessitated
due to faulty utilisation of oral feeds.
Distention of the congested intestinal layers is possibly
a contributory cause of blocked anastamosis or its dehiscence.
Honestly, how much of that did you understand? How easy was
it to read? You can speak English okay, but understanding a medical
text is a very different matter.
You can now see how a translator without a scientific or medical
background would feel when faced with this text. Translators translate
from a foreign language into her mother tongue. In other words,
a translator should ideally be a native speaker of the language
she is translating into. Somebody may possess excellent bilingual
skills, but hiring her as a translator is a sure-fire recipe for
disaster in translation, unless she is also an expert in her field.
Medical and scientific writing has its own turn of phrase. In
medical texts written in German, for example, Anamnese is a commonly
used word. Dictionaries give anamnesis as the English equivalent
- and a translator who relies solely on dictionaries is looking
for trouble. Why? Well, medical practitioners the world over never
use the expression “anamnesis”. They just call it
“case history of a patient”.
By the same token, hiring a translator with specialized subject
skills to the exclusion of language skills is no less prone to
pitfalls. For instance, a subject expert may spend many a sleepless
night over the English equivalent of Patientengut, a German word
best translated as “patient records”.
Style, we all know, is the way in which something is said, done,
expressed, or performed. Have we ever observed that scientific-technical
writing has its own style? To illustrate the point, let us take
a concrete example. Faithful to the style of the source language,
a translation would read:
Owing to improvements in medical first-aid and rescue services,
a steadily increasing number of severely injured accident victims
reach clinics in a condition in which intensive therapy may be
started.
After correction for style by a qualified subject and language
expert, the same sentence would read:
Advancements in medical first-aid and rescue services have
made it possible to immediately administer intensive care to an
increasing number of severe cases of accident victims who are
brought to hospitals.
Need we say more?
Regardless of the subject area of your documentation we are
able to provide translation for 140 languages in a timely and
cost effective manner.
Here are some of the areas we have previously
translated documents for:
- Anesthesia
- Biostatistics
- Cardiology
- Dentistry
- Diagnostics
- Electro diagnosis
- Endoscopy
- Endocrinology
- Medicine
- Prosthetics
- Toxicology
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