Know about Difficulties Faced in Medical Translation

Medical translation is the translation of the technical, regulatory, clinical or marketing documentation related to the pharmaceutical or medical or health care fields. It facilitates proper care and treatment for the patients who speak other languages. Medical translation must be done by a professional because any kind of wrong translation can have grave consequences. Medical translation requires specific training and subject matter knowledge in order to translate medical content besides the linguistic skills.

Following are the difficulties faced in medical translation:

• One of the main difficulties faced by a medical translator is there are many abbreviations and acronyms used in the medical field.
• Other difficulty faced by the medical translators is that the names of the diseases and the scientific name of the prescribed drug by the doctor for curing the diseases have the names which are long and unwieldy, effecting the communication. For instance electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG).
• There are multiple meanings for the same abbreviation or acronym, so the medical translator depending on the context has to choose the right meaning.
• Medical personnel say that when the individual is translating the messages of patient’s child or an adult relative or friend, the message usually gets lost in the translation due to interpreter’s lack of knowledge of medical terms, concepts, terminology and the technology.
• In medical translation the source language must be translated in to target language word to word and phrase to phrase.

The above are the various difficulties faced by medical interpreter.

Applications Of Machine Translation System

There are several types of MT system which are used practically for any of following basic applications:

• Dissemination: It is doing translations of publishable quality. It may not be necessarily texts which are genuinely published but texts that are of high quality. Such texts are generally necessary for organizations and usually professional translators are hired for this. The ‘raw’ unprepared output from MT systems is not sufficient, and publishable quality requires human assistance like post-editing (revision) of the translated text, pre-editing of the input, making use of controlled language, or limiting the system to a particular subject domain.
• Assimilation: It is the translation of texts for auditing (or ‘filtering’) or skimming information, or the translation of texts for casual users (nonspecialist general public), in which the ‘raw’ output from the system need not be edited. It means, recipients can get a poor quality text and also gets an idea of what the text conveys.
• Interchange: It is the interaction between various languages by individuals, by agreement, by email or by telephone. The quality of the translation (nearness to the original) is not very important, as long as people obtain the information they want, understand the text they receive, or manage to express their ideas.
• Database access: It is the use of translation to assist in obtaining information from a database present in a foreign language, this means primarily the use of translation help for browsing the Internet, for obtaining web pages. Dissemination and assimilation are regular applications of MT and translation tools from the introduction, and their usefulness for interchange and databases access are latest applications that are growing quickly, mainly with the growth of the Internet.

Situations When Computer Assisted Translation Is Applicable

The efficiency of Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) differs according to the kind of text that should be translated. Its application may demand main investments, and its effectiveness is far from immediate since the dictionaries and memories will just increase the scope gradually. The use of translation memories will provide solution to issues of deadlines when the text to be translated has experienced last-minute modifications.

Generally the client waits until the text is built before sending it to be translated. And if the publication dates are already fixed, and the last proofreader is taking more time, the translation deadline will become so short that the work should be shared among many translators. This means that there will not only be a problem of inconsistency but also there is lose in quality in other areas. In such situations, CAT will help to translate a first draft when the final report of the source text is available. CAT software is used to show all the non-modified parts automatically before handling the modifications manually. Thus deadlines and quality problems are terminated.

In successful application of CAT, the source text must have certain requirements:

• Terminological consistency: This means the same term is every time used in the same sense, and the same object or action is always described with the same term.
• Phraseological consistency: This means the same idea and the same action are every time illustrated in an absolutely same manner. This is very essential for increasing the number of repetitions and for the translation memories to be more effective.
• Short, simple phrases: They help in increasing the probability of repetition and decrease cases of uncertainty.

The application of CAT is more reasonable for texts which have long life span and which may undergo many updates.

Conditions of Language Translator and Interpreter

Language translator and interpreter did not changed with the dynamism in the world but the only things that changed are the tools, the means, the knowledge and the way of working. The translator’s work is not limited to converting one language into another. The end result has to be sincere to the original, nicely presented and competitive in price. In order to achieve the end results professionalism is essential and there are some conditions that the good professional translators and interpreters should meet they are as follows.

• Firstly the good professional translator should the follow code of ethics.
• The good professional translator is intelligent and knows that in the long run, honesty and loyalty pays off
• The good professional translator should be fair to clients so that they can also build their carrier as the translator.
• Master the source and target languages to be able to convey the message faithfully and specially the target language, where the translator has to transmit the small nuance.
• Be familiar with the topic or field being translated. The same word could mean something different in Economics or metallurgy.
• Have some knowledge in computers and modern communication tools.
• Have capacity and be ready to learn and adapt to this fast moving technological world. Never stop learning.
• The translator should never accept translation work beyond his/her capacity. Accepting impossible tasks is one of the best ways to loose customers and build a bad reputation.
• It is hard to build a trustworthy reputation and very easy to loose it. Therefore always decline impossible tasks. Better say NO than sorry in this case.

The Norwegian translator follow some of the above advice will greatly increase the chances to succeed in this borderless profession where competition is fierce. Nowadays a translator needs to be more professional that in any other profession.