How to go about pharmaceutical translations?

Pharmaceutical translation is a highly sensitive field and incorrect translations of medical and pharmaceutical texts can risk directly impacting people’s health.

Translators working in the pharmaceutical field take on a considerable amount of responsibility towards consumers and patients, as well as towards the manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, and machinery.

What knowledge do you need to possess to become a medical or pharmaceutical translator?

People often think of translation as a standard process that involves replacing words in one language with words in another language.

As much as this may be true, translators also have to take into consideration the particularities of individual texts when translating them. Poetry, literary, and medical translations all make use of different registers and possess unique features.

Scientific translations – and pharmaceutical translations, in particular – require the use of specific, highly accurate terms, i.e., scientific terminology that corresponds to the original text.

For this reason, we recommend entrusting pharmaceutical translations to qualified professional translators who are experts in the field.

Professional translators use computerised glossaries – which are sometimes provided by the pharmaceutical companies themselves – to translate words correctly and with precision. When translating medical and pharmaceutical texts, translators must also abide by the principle of unambiguity.

In the pharmaceutical field, there is one exact term for each particular scientific process, compound or chemical element. The correct terms must always be used if you want to produce high-quality medical and pharmaceutical translations.

The importance of proofreading pharmaceutical translations

In addition to containing accurate terminology, translated pharmaceutical texts must also be very well written. Typos and syntactic or grammatical errors are unacceptable and risk compromising the reliability of the text and, consequently, the product being described.

As such, it is essential to entrust pharmaceutical proofreading and pharmaceutical translation services to experienced professionals.

Finally, you mustn’t forget graphic components (i.e., page layouts and text formatting) if you want a translation to fulfil its brief. A text that has been accurately translated but is incorrectly formatted or does not fit into the print layout will result in a low-quality final product.