Medical Translation is the translation of healthcare related documentation and literature, healthcare websites and pharmaceutical terminologies and research papers. It is a very big industry and all healthcare institutions require medical translation services for academic purposes as well as marketing and other internal and external communication purposes. This is in every case done by companies that provide medical translation services.
Trading of medical equipment and pharmaceutical products and services happens across the borders in addition to their demand in the domestic markets. This is the basic reason why companies manufacturing medical equipment and pharmaceutical products and provides other medical related services need multilingual translation services. Other than these translation of information leaflets, package inserts, clinical findings, clinical reports, academic articles in medical journals etc. are also translated on a large scale every day across the world.
Medical Translation is very expensive and machine translation completely failed in rendering translations properly. Human translators are to be hired in order to get the translations done properly. The skill set required in medical translators is completely different from that required in other fields of translation. Translators who are native and have an academic background related to medicine, aesthetics, biotechnology, genetics etc. must be hired as applied given to the kind of content to be translated. The academic background is not enough and a systematic due diligence must be done to ascertain the level of expertise and experience that translator or the translation agency has before assigning the project.
Medical Translation is expensive for many reasons. The main 5 reasons being as follows:
Expert Translators are Fewer in Number
There is a scarcity of expert medical translators in every language. The demand being high and the supply being low the price for medical translation services has been always expensive and is on the rise every year as time passes by.
Medical Translation Projects are Time Consuming & Tedious
The translation of medical documents and literature of all kinds take a lot of time and hard work of the translators. They need to spend time in research and find all the proper terminologies. Referring to multiple dictionaries and available medical literature in the target language is necessary for the translators and hence a lot of time is absorbed doing these additional activities to render a 100% accurate translation. This is also one of the main reasons why medical translation services are the most expensive of all kinds of translation services.
Complexity of the Content
The nature of content in medical documents and other medical literatures are always complex in nature. The complex nature of medical documents accounts for the service charges for its translation being expensive.
Most Documents being Hand Written
Most of the documents are hand written and not eligible so easily at one chance. The translator needs to read it again and again and sometimes consult the doctor to understand what he has written. Translation of hand written documents is expensive.
Risk Involved
There is a huge burden of risk on the shoulders of the translators doing medical translation. The risk being inherent in this nature of translation has made it expensive.