Medical staffs are trained to serve people, not to translate documents and texts. Therefore, they are often unable to communicate with patients who come from abroad. Medical staffs need to work under continuous pressure and stress which is another good reason for hiring qualified medical translators. Choosing medical translation as a profession is a great decision, though it takes dedication and hard work to become a good medical translator.
While medical translation is a great career for anyone, you would hardly find any institution that trains and provides certification in order to become a medical translator. There are no national standards or regulations in order to monitor this field and keep things in an arranged way. It’s like a double-edged sword as there are no clear processes and procedures to qualify for translating medical documents on one hand and on the other hand, only a handful of hoops are available where you need to jump through to take on this work. Although there are no solid institution available for training and no rules and regulations to maintain the quality of the translation, you should try your best to take all the preparations in order to get the best translation job and perform task assigned to you competently.
The most important of all is that you need to be bilingual. The more languages you know the better offers you will receive. However, you need to have deep knowledge of at least two languages instead of having conversational understanding of multiple languages. It’s important to have an understanding of conversational style in order to communicate with the patients but it’s not enough for translating professional documents. You need to understand the inherent and potential meaning of everything that is said in a particular document. The most important thing of translation is fluency. It’s like an ornament for a translated document without which the translation doesn’t become complete. Although there are no standardization organizations for maintaining the standard of translation, you can have certification for your fluency in many medical institutions. They will take exams on your fluency of translation before appointing you as one of their employer.
The unique textual content will first be converted by an experienced medical translation. After that, another professional translation will check the converted textual content to make sure that it is correct. Following that, an in-country doctor will be used to evaluation the translations to guarantee that it satisfies all the regulating features and comprehensible to the local medica.
Medical translation is a very delicate sector of translation where there is no room for mistakes as it’s the question of life and death of people. You should make yourself skilled enough before taking any job.