Never as in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic, has the absolute importance of international coordination of research efforts been made clear; and it is precisely for this reason that specialized medical translations have once again confirmed their importance. Is it possible, as is sometimes suggested, to entrust the translation of clinical trials and related documents to any competent translator in the language of destination?
We will try to explain briefly here why the answer to this question is decidedly negative, and what the essential added value of relying on specialized medical translators is.
It is essential for pharmaceutical companies and researchers to have a translation service that meets precise quality requirements: processed information must in fact be transmitted with total precision, and any error or ambiguity could have enormous consequences. The first connotation of a medical translator must therefore be, of course, linguistic competence in both the source and target languages; however this is only a necessary starting point, and far from sufficient.
Just as a person, even an educated person, can read the reports of a clinical trial in his own language and not understand them, so the translator who only has perfect knowledge of the two languages - the one in which the trial report was written and the one in which they must translate it - may find themselves not understanding the real meaning of some terms or entire concepts, and therefore translate them imperfectly, ambiguously, or even incorrectly.
A first reason, therefore, to support the need to employ translators specialized in the medical field, and especially for clinical trials, is that of the importance of absolute precision in the rendering of the original text in the language.
Secondly, we recall that the sharing of clinical trials worldwide is not limited to the final reports that researchers may wish to examine, but also includes - and we could say massively so- a whole series of preliminary documentation, including for example the protocols of the clinical trial itself. In these papers the purposes of the trial are outlined, the methods explained and the organization of the procedures clarified, and the statistical aspects analyzed. A translator who is limited to having a linguistic competence - even an excellent one - could however lack the ability to render this kind of content in an effective and immediately useful way for the target culture: a specialized medical translator, on the contrary, knows the field and how to organize information in the text to make it maximally usable.
Speaking of variety of documents as we mentioned above, a third essential element emerges which highlights the preferability of entrusting the translation of clinical trials to a specialized professional in this field. In fact, the documents relating to clinical trials include not only the protocols, which we talked about above, but also papers dedicated to participants and patients:
- Questionnaires to determine the possibility of taking the test
- Reports to inform participants of known side effects
- Consent forms to confirm that data subjects have been informed of all the elements necessary to decide whether to participate in the clinical trial
- Participants' medical records, to allow trial directors to check for any reasons to exclude someone from the clinical test.
In the translation and rendering of all these contents it becomes necessary to combine terminological and scientific accuracy with the ability to transmit information in a form that is not only understandable, but in harmony with the way of reasoning and worldview of speakers of the target language - a skill that first of all requires a profound knowledge of the culture in question. A connotation which once again is the prerogative of a specialized and experienced translator.
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