Why hire a professional (bio)medical or pharmaceutical translator?

These days a lot of people use AI without giving it much thought. In many cases there is also not a huge amount of harm done if it goes wrong. Last year, the new chancellor of the University of Ghent in Belgium had used generative AI when drafting her opening speech, causing her to mistakenly attribute certain quotes to Albert Einstein. The quotes turned out to be so-called "hallucinations," a known problem whereby information is fabricated by AI. The mishap generated some laughs here and there, as well as some calls for her to resign, but in the end no one died. When it comes to (bio)medical and pharmaceutical documents, things can go horribly wrong very quickly. Hiring a professional translator and reviewer will make sure that your content meets regulatory demands, is stylistically well written and most importantly—that nobody dies or gets injured. Here's why:

• We know what to look for—and where to find it! We are aware that certain sentences or paragraphs cannot be translated freely, but must follow a template created by a health authority. We know which EMA template to check for summaries of product characteristics or patient information leaflets, and we know where to find the most recent country-specific template for informed consent forms. This brings us to the next advantage of hiring a professional translator:

  
  

• We are aware of country-specific differences between two variants of the same language. While some translation tools are able to differentiate between American and British English, or European and Brazilian Portuguese, many other languages are seen as one and the same. In medical translations, this can lead to dramatic outcomes. For example, the sentence “This drug should not be taken on an empty stomach” could be translated into Dutch for the Netherlands as “Dit geneesmiddel moet niet op een lege maag worden ingenomen.” But in Dutch for Belgium, this same sentence would be interpreted as “This drug does not have to be taken on an empty stomach, but it can be.” We probably don’t have to tell you what the consequences of that could be.

  
  

• Last but not least: we don’t just translate your content like mindless robots—we truly engage with your text and in doing so, we spot the errors that you have missed. And trust us when we say that this happens in most if not all projects, especially the larger ones. Sometimes it’s minor errors, such as punctuation or spelling errors, but at times there is also a mismatch of information within the same document. For example, an informed consent form that specifies a period of 3 months during which a trial participant cannot get pregnant or father a child, but in the introduction it says “6 months” or “3 weeks”. We will notice that discrepancy and ask you to confirm which one is correct, so you can then also correct it in the source file.