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Medical Translation Tip 01

Here we will illustrate the importance of having a solid medical background when translating for medical and pharmaceutical companies.

Recently, a new client asked us to re-translate the medical documents that their former translation agency had mishandled. The client realized there was a problem only six months after the original translation was completed. He was visiting an overseas pharmaceutical customer and was surprised to see pages of his company's literature marked up with colored markers posted on the customer’s bulletin board. The customer explained that the medical staff found the document to be hilarious and posted the "best parts" on the bulletin board.

We looked at the translation and understood immediately what had happened: the original medical document translators may have been good translators, but they did not have a sufficient background in medical technology. They did not even know how bad a job they had done.

One of the representative sentences in the original document was "The medical system was taken down by a simple packet corruption attack."  The Spanish translator translated the sentence as "The medical system was powered down by an attack designed to corrupt simple packets." The Japanese translator mistranslated the same sentence as "The attack on corruption by simple packets brought down the medical system."  Both linguists translated all the words correctly, but each got the meaning completely wrong. The problem was not in the terminology. Any translator with a good dictionary and Internet access can look up the translation of medical terms. The problem is that there is nothing in the language itself or in any dictionary that can help a translator disambiguate and properly translate phrases that involve the concepts he does not understand.

In particular, these translators did not have sufficient understanding of the subject matter to disambiguate the reference of the terms "simple" and "corruption." Although grammatically the word "simple" could refer to either packets or attack, a medical professional immediately knows that in this case it refers to the attack. Indeed, the packets in question are unlikely to have been simple. 

Neither the grammar of English nor the semantics of the words in the English sentence would prevent the translators from concluding that the purpose of the attack was to corrupt the packets (as the Spanish translator inferred) or to fight corruption of the system (as the Japanese translator concluded). Only familiarity with Internet security prevents one from making those interpretations. Someone with the medical background would understand the sentence to mean that the purpose of the attack by the hacker was to corrupt the computer system, not to corrupt the packets themselves.

Medical language works only when the speaker and the audience share the same background knowledge and understand the context of communication. The document the translators worked with was targeted at an audience of medical professionals and presupposed some basic understanding of internet protocols, networking, and security issues. Translators who have less of a background in the field than the target audience for whom they are translating can get every word translated correctly, but are destined to make very embarrassing mistranslations.

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