Q6. Are you saying that agencies exploit their translators?

Undoubtedly, in many cases. However, the reality is more complex. The free rein enjoyed by medical translation providers is not solely due to agency opportunism. Translator permissiveness and client laxity are also involved:

• Translators as individuals - if you manage to meet one - tend to confirm their caricature as back-room personalities ill at ease in the world of ties, suits and business meetings. They are happiest with the tidiness of text, a relationship that for many would seem to be consummated if they could only crawl into the circuitry of the grey boxes over which they pass their days. ‘Expansive’, ‘mercurial’, ‘flamboyant’ - these are the kind of adjectives which have probably never been used to describe a translator. Headlines such as ‘Translator bonuses top $10 million’ or ‘Translator tames Madonna’ are inconceivable. Translator personalities are ripe for appropriation by agents who on the contrary tend to be charming outgoing individuals with no taste for text. The relationship between the two is powerfully symbiotic.
• Pharmaceutical industry clients frequently delegate the sourcing of translation providers to secretaries without competence in either the languages or subject matter involved. More often than not, even the end-users of translations are themselves incompetent to assess the linguistic quality of a text, since they are rarely native speakers of the target language and it is thus convenient for them to place their trust in agency claims. For this reason, Lingua Medica tends to be preferred by native English speakers - MDs, pharmacists and linguists - working in non-English-language companies, since often it is only they who are able confidently to distinguish between Lingua Medica product and an agency translation.