FAA, FDA, NTSB, FAA, SEC, NRC. These acronyms for US organizations are household names for many people. They are often followed by a list of other names that may bring up images of fear and fraud: Enron, Madoff, Vioxx, Three Mile Island, Bear Sterns. The common thread among the agencies mentioned above is that they […]

It just makes sense that the text you choose to include in your most important medical product documents (i.e. IFUs, User/Operator’s Manuals, Labels, Technical Specifications, Drug Indications, etc) is critical to the overall quality of how the product is used and prescribed. Words and phrases are carefully selected so that the information is precisely communicated. […]

What is a Translation Memory? A translation memory (TM) is a linguistic database that continually captures your translations as you work for future use. All previously translated segments are accumulated within the translation memory (in source and target language pairs called translation units) and reused so that you never have to translate the same sentence […]

The last decade of the 21st century brought more changes in publishing technology. Not only did publishing move from paper to the WWW, but it became more versatile, effective and interactive. Publications could be searched and content could be extracted. Additionally, multimedia features deepened access to published information. Hypertext links enabled users to navigate through […]

In the translation industry, we tend to undervalue the creative aspects of the translation process. We rather focus on objective quality standards and evaluation methods to obtain measurable results about the translation output. We prefer to link translation quality to quantifiable and assessable variables. Our different QA steps are designed to guarantee accuracy, completeness and […]

In our last entry about patents in Europe, we wondered when it would be possible to talk about a unique pan-European patent system. That has already become a reality! European Parliament gave its approval to member states so that they could use the enhanced cooperation procedure in order to establish a unique patent system within […]

“It scares the heck out of me that people are still thinking it is effective,” said Dr. Charles Lee, referring to a commonly used computer software program responsible for translating prescription labels. Studies conducted in 2010 reveal that such push button translation programs are only around 50 percent accurate. This means that if you cannot […]

1. Content Imperial English measurements such as length, temperature, etc. are often found in documentation for medical device translation. Most linguists need to convert these measurements to Metric to localize the translation. In a multiple language project, you may find slight variances of these conversions. Suggestion for source document: provide both Imperial and Metric measurements […]

Consider the following statements from different areas of our world: Health: More than one third of U.S. adults —more than 72 million— people and 17% of U.S. children are obese. From 1980 through 2008, obesity rates for adults have doubled and rates for children have tripled. Science: Nearly 3 million years ago, our ancestors had […]