10 Tips for Getting Medical Translation Right

Medical translation involves a number of unique stakeholders and partners:

• Regulatory
• Labeling Engineering
• Software
• Marketing
• Writers
• Translators
• Printers

The successful management of medical translations involves knowing how to bring together the various stakeholders at just the right time, with clear goals and responsibilities.

The following tips offer some basic guidance for medical translation best practices, and are intended to be customized to meet your particular corporate needs and culture.

Build a solid In-country Review Team.

Good localization practice includes an in-country review of translations. The team of reviewers may consist of distributors, local company staff, Sees, or in-country partners, and the management of the in-country review team is critical to success.

Start by defining roles and responsibilities, and using other tools such as approved glossaries and style guides to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Build glossaries and style guides for each language.

In the medical field, translation quality and consistency can be life-or-death.

To help ensure translation quality, develop glossaries of key terminology, have them approved by stakeholders, and create a shared online environment such as GlobalTerm™ to ensure controlled access and usability of your glossary across the entire team.

Identify standard content.

To improve quality and save time and money, identify warranties, product statements, address blocks and symbols that will be used throughout your documentation, or reused across all languages.

Regardless of how you manage your content—from a manual process to a sophisticated CMS—the first step is identifying and standardizing your basic content.

Determine standard applications, layout design, and sizes.

Standardize your production workflow, including:

• Applications (such as InDesign)
• Layouts (that accommodate multiple languages and scripts)
• Print sizes (for IFUs, manuals, and the like)

Standardization will help you reduce costs, speed up the revision process, and even strengthen your brand.

Learn the requirements of your internal stakeholders.

To meet deadlines and avoid costly rework, consult with your stakeholders in Regulatory, Engineering, Packaging/Labeling, and Compliance to create an efficient process and a clear understanding of each area’s requirements.

Your translation partner should be able to contribute knowledge and experience of your stakeholder’s concerns and requirements, such as developing symbols lists and layout, packaging regulations, allowed font size, training and documentation for  in-country reviews, and more.

Document your translation process.

You probably have highly-defined processes for managing your content, revisions, labeling, and approvals. Your translation processes should also be well-defined and documented.

The right translation partner can help you set up and implement a customized translation process that will scale to accommodate your growth into new markets and media.

Use translation tools and technologies.

There are a whole host of great tools that help reduce costs, improve quality and consistency, and speed up turn-around time. These are not “machine translation,” but tools that help professional translators, project managers and localization experts do their job.

You don’t necessarily have to buy these tools—just work with the right partners who employ them and who will help you optimize your processes to get the most out of them.

Have your translation partner manage the Reviewer relationships.

Managing your In-country Reviewers is frequently considered one of the trickiest balances to strike in the whole translation process. It is often best to turn the whole reviewer management process over to your translation partner to handle. Your translation partner speaks their language, can address their concerns, and will only escalate issues to your attention if necessary.

Involve your translation partner in the printing stage.

Printing across many languages involves file formats, special fonts, multilingual preflighting, and many other specialized print management processes.

Getting your translation partner to work directly with your printer can result in fewer errors, better quality, and fewer headaches.

Choose the right translation partner

The most important translation decision you will make is to choose the right partner, one that will balance strategic needs and process with day-to-day operations and management of budgets, schedules and quality.

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For more information on how Prisma's partnership approach can help you develop a seamless In-Country Review process, contact us:

Prisma International, Inc.
Main: +1-612-338-1500
info@prisma.com

10 Tips to a More Effective In-Country Review:

In-Country Review, or ICR, is an important quality-assurance step in the overall translation process.

ICR consists of getting feedback, insights, "tweaks," and local marketing adjustments to translations, marketing messages, and branding issues, that ensure the best possible translations and messaging for a given local audience.

ICR can be a notoriously tricky process, as it relies on in-country employees, partners, or distributors who are always busy and frequently out of the communication loop. The result is often delayed reviews, non-value-add changes, missed production schedules and even bad feelings among the global review team.

The following tips offer some basic guidance for getting your ICR off on the right foot, and are intended to be customized to meet your particular corporate needs and culture.

Establish a formal ICR process

Start with a clear, formalized process that spells out the “3 R’s”: roles, responsibilities, and recognition.

A solid ICR process should also include a documented workflow for resolving language questions or issues as they arise.

The actual review work will go much more smoothly, and everyone’s time and contribution will be maximized, if you invest up front in building a clear ICR process.

A good Translation Partner will help you set up a good process, and a great Translation Partner will actually lead you through it.

Build a great ICR Team

Get reviewer buy-in. Choose your ICR team based on a number of key factors, including:

• Subject matter knowledge
• Local market/language knowledge
• Ability to provide constructive feedback
• Responsiveness/desire to help

Make a great ICR Team with two-way communication, clear expectations, and adherence to a common timeline.

Train the Reviewers

Reviewers need to be trained in the ICR process.

The small investment of time it takes to bring reviewers up to speed will result in continued savings going forward in time, cost and potential misunderstandings.

Ask your Translation Partner to play an active role in the training and coaching of your reviewers. If they can’t or won’t, it’s time to reconsider the partnership.

Use Glossaries, Style Guides, and Reviewer Guidelines

Translation best practices include glossaries and style guides (preferably online), and reviewer guidelines that spell out roles, responsibilities and tasks.

A good Translation Partner will help you set up and implement these important tools.

Establish a shared editing platform

A shared review platform, usually PDF, makes the whole process much smoother.

In some cases, full versions of Adobe Acrobat may need to be purchased to enable annotating and commenting—and reviewers may need to be trained—but that small investment will be well-worth the efficiencies gained by having a shared editing platform.

Use translation memory tools to capture ICR changes

Translation memory tools can do wonders, but only if you have an airtight process to incorporate ICR changes into the memory.

Make sure you have allocated resources—time and budget—to capture all of your reviewers’ changes in the translation memory, so that the reviewers are not making the same comments and corrections over and over again.

Your Translation Partner should be taking care of this seamlessly; if not, you’re paying for it!

Consider letting your Translation Partner manage the review team

Many clients like to handle all communication with the review team, but the whole process goes more smoothly when the Translation Partner manages the reviewers directly.

We speak their language, can interpret their concerns and wishes, and channel their feedback quickly and effectively, only bringing in the client as necessary.

If your Translation Partner isn’t currently managing your ICR, consider it. If they are and it isn’t going smoothly, you may want to reconsider the partnership.

Build adequate time in the project schedule for ICR

Frequently, ICR is treated as an afterthought, instead of a valuable quality improvement step.

Build adequate time for ICR into your project schedule. This will reduce errors or rework and reduce costs through efficiencies, and show your reviewers that you value their input.

A good Translation Partner will help you develop realistic ICR schedules that still meet your critical deadlines. If your project schedules are off and your in-country reviews are taking too long, it’s time to rein both in and fix them with the right Translation Partner.

Distinguish between stylistic and critical-to-quality changes

The same idea can be communicated in different ways but still retain the original value. Changing a document based on personal preference of a specific reviewer can waste, time, money and resources.

Reviewers need to know what kinds of changes to make. Start by making the basic distinction between changes that are stylistic vs. factual (or “critical-to-quality”), then communicate that to the Review Team.

Reviewers who focus on value-add comments will add the most value, and your project will have minimal scope creep.

Communicate!

Great communication is essential to successful reviews.

So, if you’re too busy to handle that, enlist the help of your Translation Partner. They should be ready to step up with the tools, experience and cultural knowledge that will help you get the most out of your global team.

Contact Info

For more information on how Prisma builds great partnerships with medical device companies, contact us:

Prisma International, Inc.
Main: +1-612-338-1500
info@prisma.com

Conducting a Translation RFP?

If you are conducting an RFP (request for proposal) to select a translation & localization service provider, you probably already have a list of requirements and questions you want to ask. But in our experience, many “standard” translation RFPs miss some key points and questions that should be asked of all prospective suppliers.

Following are several tips, questions, and suggestions you may want to consider including in your RFP.

Partnership and Coaching

A great translation company serves as your partner or coach, setting you up with Best Practices and solid processes.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of coaching, guidance, or mentoring can you offer us?
• Will we have to pay for that assistance?
• Can you offer success stories where you’ve helped similar-sized companies get up to speed in managing translations?

Training & Mentoring

If you have an internal department or person responsible for managing translations, they may need training or mentoring.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of training programs, if any, do you offer to help companies better manage their translations?
• Can you provide examples of a syllabus or curriculum showing the types of training programs you offer?
• What are the costs associated with your training offerings?

Strategic Solution

Translation management has grown to be highly strategic, and calls for enterprise-level solutions.

Your RFP should ask:

• What is your strategic vision for managing our translation work?
• Does your solution require special technology, an investment in resources, or a budget commitment? If so, how much?
• How can I be sure your solution is tailored to our needs, not just a cookie-cutter solution that you apply across all clients?

Project Management

You may have many translation buyers or requesters across your enterprise, and require a company with strong project management skills.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of project management model do you use?
• Do you have processes in place for handling complaints, changes of scope, corrective actions, and other quality management issues that arise?
• How will your PM team handle varied requests from multiple sources? What project tracking technologies do you use?

Quality

Translation quality is critical to every company. Ask for a detailed explanation of how the company achieves, maintains and ensures quality.

Be sure to include the following:

• Do you have a quality system? Please describe
• Is your company ISO-certified?
• Do you use metrics to track and measure quality?
• How do you handle errors?
• How do you manage in-country reviews as part of the quality process?

Translation Memory

Translation Memory (TM) tools can save significant amounts of time and cost, but only if the tools are managed expertly.

Your RFP should ask:

• What translation memory tools do you use?
• What costs are associated with your TM management?
• Who owns the translation memory?
• Is your translation memory portable and open-source, or will I be locked into using you in the future?
• Can multiple translation companies access the memory? What are the advantages and disadvantages to a shared memory?

Technology

In addition to translation memory, there are many tools and technologies that facilitate translation and translation management, reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Your RFP should ask:

• What tools and technologies do you use to manage, measure and improve translation work?
• How do you use technology to improve productivity and service?
• How do you stay current with industry technologies and tools? How do you help your clients to stay current?

Pricing

An apples to apples comparison of translation pricing across all suppliers is essential to an objective comparison of suppliers.

Your RFP should ask:

• What are your pricing units? Per source-language word? Per-hour? Per-page? Other? Please define all units.
• Are ALL costs associated with your service included in the pricing matrix?
• Please define the exact process(es) covered in the rate: translation, editing, proofreading, QCing, etc.
• Do rates vary by direction: English into target language vs. Target language into English?
• What is your discount policy for translation memory? Volume discount? Other discounts?

Management Reports

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” You will need regular translation management reports to track performance.

Your RFP should ask:

• How would you track our company’s translation activity in a way that leads to clean, rolled-up management reports?
• Can you provide examples of such reports, in addition to showing us how the reports are generated and accessed?
• Will we have to pay for such reports?

Liability, Errors and Omissions

Managing risk and determining responsibility for translation errors are important business functions.

Your RFP should ask:

• How do you manage the risk of translation errors?
• In the event a translation error is discovered, how do you determine responsibility for the error?
• How do you determine the cost of the error, and who covers that cost?
• Does your company have errors and omissions or liability insurance that covers translation errors? If so, what are the limits?

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Contact info

For more information on how Prisma builds great partnerships with medical device companies, contact us:

Prisma International, Inc.
Main: +1-612-338-1500
info@prisma.com

Getting Started in Translations—Strategically

Managing translation and localization has become increasingly strategic. Most people by now are familiar with the usual “tactical” advice—develop a good glossary and style guide, leave plenty of white space for text expansion, etc.—but how can you take your translation management to the strategic level?

Following are 10 tips for getting a strategic start to managing translations—one that will ensure you are using best practices, thinking like a global communication manager, and scaling your efforts to optimize your translation ROI.

(For a quick refresher on basic definitions—translation, localization, interpretation, globalization, etc, hover here.)

Recognize that translation is a profession

Some say that translation is the second-oldest profession in the world. Nowadays, it has become the profession of managing critical content for global audiences, carried out by skilled linguists requiring formal education and preparation beyond language proficiency or native speakers. Translation is not an afterthought to writing content in English.

The technologies of the localization field are sophisticated and powerful, and in the right hands, capable of enabling you to reach your customers and content consumers around the world with highly-targeted, culturally-appropriate messages.

But it all starts by recognizing that translation is a profession, and that it must be planned, resourced, and managed using the best business processes and professional practices available.

Think “global” from the start

Managing translations starts with learning to think globally and write for global audiences.

Learn how to develop content for a global audience, and some of the tools. Avoid cultural-centric references and messages. References to parts of the body can be risky. Think of how your users in other countries would use your materials (customer support, regulatory, date formats, currency, etc.)

Recognize that content is a key corporate asset

According to content strategist Rahel Bailie, your corporate content is a key asset, and “as anything in a company that has value, these assets must be stored, managed, and valued....".

Senior managers are rarely tuned into thinking about their translated content as a key asset, and frequently have no idea how to measure translation value or even the value of those managing translations. The result is often the dumping of translation management onto the backs of already-strained technical communicators (“here, deal with this!”) and even less understanding of multilingual content as a strategic corporate asset.

Develop a Translation Strategy

Like most complex things anymore, translation requires a strategy. In fact, that notion can be taken even further upstream to a Content Strategy, of which translation strategy is a major component.

An effective translation strategy takes into account several key components, including:

• Content consumers

  Content consumers A term preferred by Content Strategist Rahel Bailie over end-users, readers, etc.

• Your company’s business processes, culture and limitations
• Technology to manage and deliver the content experience
• The workflows and needs for developing and managing both source- and target-language content (authors, content managers, translators)

Train your Management

Develop a “business case” (what’s this?)

In addition, you will need to build consensus and understanding of the impact of translations across your team or enterprise. Translation cost across many functional areas—from marketing to programming, regulatory to procurement, help desks to engineering. Your business case should consider both the impact on and support needed from each of your critical functional areas.

Consider Quality

Translation quality, like anything involving language, is both art and science. Consider the following strategic questions:

• How do I measure translation quality?
• How do I ensure we are getting quality translations?
• How can I plan for a quality translation process?

A solid translation partner can address many of these questions, but will only be as effective as the partnership allows. Invest up front in framing quality as a central requirement, and work with your translation partner and your own management to build the processes to ensure you get it.

Word$, word$, word$: What to translate?

The basic unit of translation cost is “per word.” So, it makes sense to manage cost by first asking a few basic questions: Does all of our content need to be translated? Might we be just as effective in our communication by translating only relevant sections or documents? Can we use techniques and strategies of minimalism? (what’s this?). Can we reduce translation volume by using images, pictures, and diagrams?

These basic questions can result not only in lower costs, but in sharper, more effective messages for your global audiences.

Translation Metrics I: Setting up to measure performance

Measuring translation performance is key to tracking, improving and optimizing your translation management. Metrics can also be critical to justifying decisions and demonstrating the value of your efforts to a senior management that only speaks the language of numbers.

But what exactly are metrics? Companies use metrics—or measurements and reports—to show performance in many different settings, from manufacturing to profitability, throughput to quality control. Such metrics cover both internal performance and supplier efforts. Business process improvements such as Six Sigma, Lean, and many others are based on effective, thoughtful use of metrics.

Translation metrics are no different: by measuring translation performance, we can improve performance, deliver more value and achieve the best quality possible.

One more thing: If your job includes translation coordination or management, you should be gathering translation metrics to demonstrate to your management the results you are delivering to your company, which then becomes—ideally—the basis for recognition of the value you are delivering as a translation coordinator.

A strategic Translation Partner will make sure you are set up with the right metrics, and offer you a translation portal that captures most of the inputs as work occurs.

Translation Metrics II: Some examples

Translation metrics cover a set of performance factors that span the full gamut of business indices, including:

• Translation Quality
• On-time delivery
• Cost savings via Translation Memory
• Reduction of Help Desk time
• Speed-to-market improvements
• Global customer satisfaction
• Reduction of source word count
• Translation vendor performance

To be most effective, your metrics should be customized to your company’s needs and culture, such as:

• Your divisions or departments
• Your product lines or brands
• Your budget categories
• Your languages by region or geography

A strategic Translation Partner will offer you a metrics-based translation portal that, with or without customization, can set you up with the right metrics to measure, improve and optimize performance—both yours and theirs—over time.

Choose the right translation partner

Not all translation companies think strategically. In fact, most do not.

The most important decision you can make that will affect the success of your translation efforts is to select the right translation partner—one that thinks strategically and who can advise, lead and coach you along the path.

The right partner will give you just the amount of information you need—not drown you in details, or leave you with a lack of communication.

If you’re conducting an RFQ or RFP to select a partner, click here for FREE advice on the right questions to ask.

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