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Questions and answers
Q10
Must a medical translator
be medically qualified?
No, provided the translator is aware of his/her limitations. A
substantial proportion of medical translation deals with basic
research, pharmaceutics, pharmacology, laboratory devices, i.e.
areas for which a medical training provides no specific
preparation and in which MDs in turn need to be aware of their
limitations unless they happen to have acquired the relevant
experience. Otherwise such fields are best tackled by bioscientists or pharmacists.
However, there is no doubt that a medical training followed by
several years of clinical and laboratory experience, preferably
including medical authorship, is a huge asset for a medical
translator, in terms of both confidence and range. It is
indispensable for highly clinical texts, e.g. discharge summaries
and adverse event reports, often dictated by exhausted junior
hospital doctors and typed by inadequately trained temps, which
can be a minefield for anyone without the relevant clinical and
linguistic background. It is, or at least should be, unethical for
a pharmaceutical company to entrust such material to translators
lacking demonstrable clinical knowledge and experience. Operative
surgery is another field in which clarity, accuracy and authority
are virtually impossible to achieve without an MD background
allied to experience in the specialty concerned or, failing that,
without close cooperation between a medically qualified translator
and an operative specialist. |
