Q5. But Agency X refers to ‘rigorous translator selection’, ‘multistep editing of every translation’, and even ‘quality control by physicians’?

Indeed. But such statements are mantra, not fact. They are what the client wants to hear. They are also what the best of translation agency directors would actually do if only the world were not as it is, with deadlines, profit margins and the like. It requires only common sense and consideration of the volume of work involved to realize that such statements cannot be true.

In Lingua Medica’s experience, thorough checking by one physician of another physician's translation can take up to a quarter of the time required to do the translation itself. Scarcely any of the specialist medical translation agencies that we know of have a full-time physician- or pharmacist-linguist on their staff, i.e. they do not even have anyone in-house who is competent and available to conduct an authoritative review of a text of clinical medicine or pharmaceutics. The one or two agencies that do are physically incapable of checking in-depth more than a fraction of the turnover required to keep the agency in business.

In practice, even in the best of agencies, what such assurances mean is this: freelance translators (mostly with a language background, often no formal training in a bioscience, let alone medicine or pharmacy) are selected on the basis of their CV and readiness to accept the rate offered. Their first translation is reviewed by an in-house staff member in terms of sample sentences and general presentation. If judged satisfactory, and in the absence of complaints from clients, their subsequent work is reviewed rarely, if at all. It is simply transferred, under new filenames, to the client. Some of the most successful medical translation agencies, working with major pharmaceutical companies, operate simply as file transfer nodes, with a single secretary and a couple of partners without formal training in bioscience, pharmacy, medicine or languages.

It is worth recalling in this regard that the translation industry - the medical component of which was estimated by a pharma industry professional writing in a 2001 issue of the Swiss translators' magazine, Der Übersetzer, to represent a market running into hundreds of millions of dollars annually - is wholly unregulated on both sides of the Atlantic. There is nothing to stop - and nothing does stop - anyone with a telephone and PC setting up a medical translation agency, with a drug industry compendium in one hand and a translator register in the other. Nor is there any indication that this state of affairs is likely to change.