In the sharing spirit of the season, VeraSci is presenting a three-part blog series to use as a guide when selecting your language services partner. With the enormous investments and challenging timelines required for bringing new therapies to market, choosing the right partner has never been a more critical decision.
In this, our first post of the series, we’ll cover translation services and some of the advantages of working with a language partner experienced in clinical trials. In the second installment, we’ll explain why accurate interpretation is critical to the success of a clinical trial and how having the right partner can make all the difference. We’ll finish up the series by illustrating the impact that localization and cultural adaptation can have when executing trials across the globe.
For over a decade, VeraSci’s linguistics experts have been providing language services for global clinical trials. We hope the insight we’ve gained and will share in this blog series will prove valuable to you as you select your language partners in the future.
Translations
Accurate translations can make or break your study. The cost of translation is a fraction of a clinical trial, but the costs of incorrect translations are high and the risks to patients are real. One error in a translation can cause costly delays, endanger patients, and/or compromise data quality. On the other hand, accurate translations can improve trial participant understanding, which is key to a successful trial.
There are several options to choose from for clinical trial document translation, two of which are:
- Using Machine Translation (MT) – software such as Google Translate
- Enlisting professional translation services experienced in clinical trials
Which option you choose will largely depend on your translation goals.
Machine translation is a good option if you are looking for a broad overview of a document or the general gist of what the document is about. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that many words and phrases have more than one meaning, as illustrated in our seasonal example of “Winter Wonderland.” Machines often struggle with idioms and other non-literal translations, whereas professional language partners search for and identify non-literal translations and translate accordingly.
Choosing the right partner can increase the accuracy of your translations and help you to meet critical deadlines.
At VeraSci, we go beyond the industry standard to provide a higher level of translation accuracy and agility by delivering customer-focused solutions and processes. Our unique workflow includes quality assurance oversight by a team of PhD-level scientists as well as in-house software development and information technology teams, ensuring that the complexities of medical and technical terminologies are correctly translated. This workflow also has been developed for efficiency and has resulted in our 100% on-time delivery metric.
In addition to translation services, VeraSci specializes in interpretation, localization, and training in over 150 languages. Check back next week to find out how accurate interpretation can help you avoid costly pitfalls in your next clinical trial.