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10 Tips for Getting Medical Translation Right

Medical translation involves a number of unique stakeholders and partners:

• Regulatory
• Labeling Engineering
• Software
• Marketing
• Writers
• Translators
• Printers

The successful management of medical translations involves knowing how to bring together the various stakeholders at just the right time, with clear goals and responsibilities.

The following tips offer some basic guidance for medical translation best practices, and are intended to be customized to meet your particular corporate needs and culture.

Build a solid In-country Review Team.

Good localization practice includes an in-country review of translations. The team of reviewers may consist of distributors, local company staff, Sees, or in-country partners, and the management of the in-country review team is critical to success.

Start by defining roles and responsibilities, and using other tools such as approved glossaries and style guides to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Build glossaries and style guides for each language.

In the medical field, translation quality and consistency can be life-or-death.

To help ensure translation quality, develop glossaries of key terminology, have them approved by stakeholders, and create a shared online environment such as GlobalTerm™ to ensure controlled access and usability of your glossary across the entire team.

Identify standard content.

To improve quality and save time and money, identify warranties, product statements, address blocks and symbols that will be used throughout your documentation, or reused across all languages.

Regardless of how you manage your content—from a manual process to a sophisticated CMS—the first step is identifying and standardizing your basic content.

Determine standard applications, layout design, and sizes.

Standardize your production workflow, including:

• Applications (such as InDesign)
• Layouts (that accommodate multiple languages and scripts)
• Print sizes (for IFUs, manuals, and the like)

Standardization will help you reduce costs, speed up the revision process, and even strengthen your brand.

Learn the requirements of your internal stakeholders.

To meet deadlines and avoid costly rework, consult with your stakeholders in Regulatory, Engineering, Packaging/Labeling, and Compliance to create an efficient process and a clear understanding of each area’s requirements.

Your translation partner should be able to contribute knowledge and experience of your stakeholder’s concerns and requirements, such as developing symbols lists and layout, packaging regulations, allowed font size, training and documentation for  in-country reviews, and more.

Document your translation process.

You probably have highly-defined processes for managing your content, revisions, labeling, and approvals. Your translation processes should also be well-defined and documented.

The right translation partner can help you set up and implement a customized translation process that will scale to accommodate your growth into new markets and media.

Reduce Translation Spend 20-30%

A cloud-based TMaaS can have a real impact on your translation budget, reducing your costs by:

• consolidating multiple vendors’ TMs into a single enterprise TM
• eliminating the need to send out many minimum charge jobs to your localization vendors
• improving the authoring process, which improves leveraging
• incorporating “legacy assets” into the TM

Our ROI calculator can help estimate the amount of savings you will realize by migrating to a TMaaS. You can find it here, or contact us for a personal walk-through.
 

Have your translation partner manage the Reviewer relationships.

Managing your In-country Reviewers is frequently considered one of the trickiest balances to strike in the whole translation process. It is often best to turn the whole reviewer management process over to your translation partner to handle. Your translation partner speaks their language, can address their concerns, and will only escalate issues to your attention if necessary.

Involve your translation partner in the printing stage.

Printing across many languages involves file formats, special fonts, multilingual preflighting, and many other specialized print management processes.

Getting your translation partner to work directly with your printer can result in fewer errors, better quality, and fewer headaches.

Choose the right translation partner

The most important translation decision you will make is to choose the right partner, one that will balance strategic needs and process with day-to-day operations and management of budgets, schedules and quality.

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Contact Info

For more information on how Prisma's partnership approach can help you develop a seamless In-Country Review process, contact us:

Prisma International, Inc.
Main: +1-612-338-1500
info@prisma.com

TMaaS – Translation Management as a Service

TMaaS is an emerging, cloud-based approach to managing your entire translation and localization process. Think of it as a “Translation Center in a Box,” with all of your TMs, content assets, workflow and rules located in a single place on the web.

By locating your Translation Memory in the cloud, some cool things happen:

• Instant, live, 24/7 access for all of your stakeholders (project managers, writers, developers, translators, and reviewers);

• You get instant improvement in quality, leveraging, collaboration, control and security;

• You get reduced cost and cycle.

In short, moving your translation memory to the cloud should be an easy business decision.

Over the next several slides we’ll give you 10 key reasons you need to consider TMaaS. And remember—it’s Translation Management as a Service. You don’t need to buy a thing.
 

Own the TM Asset

Your translation memory (TM), like all of your documentation, is a key corporate asset. As such, it needs to be controlled, managed and secured like any other company asset.

With TMaaS, you control your TM—the access, the permissions, and the asset itself. Your localization providers (LSPs) have complete access to use the TM and even manage it, but ultimate control of this asset remains in your hands. Changing LSPs, translators, or even reviewers is as easy as changing login permissions.

In a TMaaS environment, there’s no vendor lock-in: you own the TM asset, and control remains yours.

Improve your TM Security

Companies have strong controls over internal documents and communication, with firewalls, confidentiality rules and procedures in place.

However, translation memories are usually held by localization vendors. Typically, for each new project the entire TM is sent around the world to in-country translators, meaning that your corporate assets are only as secure as the weakest link in a complex translation supply chain.

In contrast, a cloud-based TMaaS uses a different workflow: translators around the globe access the TM online to carry out their work, and can only access the immediate content they’re working on, not the entire memory. This controlled environment means your TM remains secure and protected, while still enabling work to take place at the speed of global business.

TMaaS is IT-Ready

With TMaaS, there’s no software to buy or install. Like any SaaS, you get instant access through your browser, avoiding IT hassles, compatibility issues, support problems, and lengthy software approval processes.

Further, when it comes to integration with existing internal systems, an open-source TMaaS can be easily “bolted” onto other apps using standard APIs that enable a cloud-based app to “talk” to others and play nicely in the sandbox.

In sum, a cloud-based TMaaS gives you all the benefits of a complete IT solution, with none of the IT problems inherent in selecting, buying, learning and supporting new software.

Improve Multi-Vendor Management

Many companies work with multiple LSPs (Language Service Providers)—from two, to over a dozen. With each LSP maintaining its own translation memory, that can result in overlap, inconsistency and waste. One HP study estimated the overlap at over 15% of the overall translation budget.

In a cloud-based memory environment, your LSPs all work from a single enterprise memory. The result is no overlap, better leveraging, greater consistency, and improved ROI.

Further, most TM tools force you to choose one vendor; with a TMaaS, you can have as many LSPs as you like, keeping multiple preferred vendors but tying them to a single enterprise memory.

Therefore, a cloud-based TMaaS approach gives you the best of both worlds: a single enterprise TM but the ability to work with multiple LSPs, located anywhere in the world.

Increase Your Translation ROI

Translation ROI is the result of many factors coming together to bring you the greatest value for your translation spend. A cloud-based TMaaS increases ROI in several ways:

1. By offering a live working environment for translators, the TM is updated in real time, offering instant leveraging as other translators work on the same or similar documents.
2. Cloud-based TMaaS systems use cutting-edge algorithms for leveraging and context matching, resulting in a higher degree of matching and therefore decreased translation costs.
3. An enterprise TM means your various LSPs will benefit from a shared memory, increasing leveraging for all of them and improving your ROI.
4. When your authors and content developers have access to your TM up front, they can check previous content to ensure consistent writing, which will improve leveraging and decrease costs.

In summary, placing your TM in a cloud-based, enterprise environment brings significant ROI benefit throughout the process, from source to target, authoring to leveraging.

Reduce Translation Spend 20-30%

A cloud-based TMaaS can have a real impact on your translation budget, reducing your costs by:

• consolidating multiple vendors’ TMs into a single enterprise TM
• eliminating the need to send out many minimum charge jobs to your localization vendors
• improving the authoring process, which improves leveraging
• incorporating “legacy assets” into the TM

We can calculate the amount of savings you should realize by migrating to a TMaaS. Contact us for a personal ROI calculation.
 

Centralize Your Content To Enable Global Collaboration

Your content supply chain consists of many collaborators: authors, editors, approvers, translators, reviewers, approvers, etc. By centralizing their collaboration into a single cloud-based TM environment, you increase productivity by:

• improving the workflows that tie them together
• standardizing how each contributor interacts with the content
• improving version control

Because the TM is at the heart of this global content collaboration, a cloud-based TMaaS is the best way to achieve these benefits.
 

Decrease Content Cycle Time by Days or Weeks

Document cycle time is a critical factor in the all-important time-to-market. A TMaaS environment helps decrease cycle time of the Global Content Lifecycle by:

1. automating version control, thereby reducing delays and possible errors;
2. creating a real-time enterprise translation environment;
3. automating the translation workflow, thereby speeding it up;
4. speeding up the review and approval process with In-Country Reviewers

The net effect is faster time-to-market and optimized localization flow to achieve simultaneous release.
 

Streamline Your Workflow

Locating your TM to the cloud allows you to streamline your workflow and thus realize several productivity gains:

• authors and content providers will be able to do consistency-checks against the memory;
• translators and editors will be able to work in real time, improving leveraging results;
• layout, DTP and digital media personnel can improve the publishing workflows and speed up their process.

Access Localization Reports & Metrics On-Demand

Access to localization metrics used to mean requesting numbers from your suppliers and compiling them into rolled-up reports. In contrast, a cloud-based TMaaS provides a real-time snapshot of a variety of metrics and reports on-demand. Types of reports you should be able to access include:

• translation spend, by language, department, project type, etc.
• turn-around time
• vendor performance metrics
• quality metrics

Suppose you need a quick snapshot of your translation spend for a meeting in 5 minutes, or a summary of translation activity YTD by language. In every case, a TMaaS offers you unprecedented access to such metrics, all via your browser.

LEX

LEX™ (Localization Enterprise eXchange) is Prisma’s own Translation Management as a Service, offering all of the benefits of a TMaaS without having to buy software.

To learn more about LEX™, click here.

To request a free Webinar on the benefits of a TMaaS for your company, an introduction to LEX™, or to speak with our Client Services team, click here.

Conducting a Translation RFP?

If you are conducting an RFP (request for proposal) to select a translation & localization service provider, you probably already have a list of requirements and questions you want to ask. But in our experience, many “standard” translation RFPs miss some key points and questions that should be asked of all prospective suppliers.

Following are several tips, questions, and suggestions you may want to consider including in your RFP.

Partnership and Coaching

A great translation company serves as your partner or coach, setting you up with Best Practices and solid processes.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of coaching, guidance, or mentoring can you offer us?
• Will we have to pay for that assistance?
• Can you offer success stories where you’ve helped similar-sized companies get up to speed in managing translations?

Training & Mentoring

If you have an internal department or person responsible for managing translations, they may need training or mentoring.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of training programs, if any, do you offer to help companies better manage their translations?
• Can you provide examples of a syllabus or curriculum showing the types of training programs you offer?
• What are the costs associated with your training offerings?

Strategic Solution

Translation management has grown to be highly strategic, and calls for enterprise-level solutions.

Your RFP should ask:

• What is your strategic vision for managing our translation work?
• Does your solution require special technology, an investment in resources, or a budget commitment? If so, how much?
• How can I be sure your solution is tailored to our needs, not just a cookie-cutter solution that you apply across all clients?

Project Management

You may have many translation buyers or requesters across your enterprise, and require a company with strong project management skills.

Your RFP should ask:

• What kind of project management model do you use?
• Do you have processes in place for handling complaints, changes of scope, corrective actions, and other quality management issues that arise?
• How will your PM team handle varied requests from multiple sources? What project tracking technologies do you use?

Quality

Translation quality is critical to every company. Ask for a detailed explanation of how the company achieves, maintains and ensures quality.

Be sure to include the following:

• Do you have a quality system? Please describe
• Is your company ISO-certified?
• Do you use metrics to track and measure quality?
• How do you handle errors?
• How do you manage in-country reviews as part of the quality process?

Translation Memory

Translation Memory (TM) tools can save significant amounts of time and cost, but only if the tools are managed expertly.

Your RFP should ask:

• What translation memory tools do you use?
• What costs are associated with your TM management?
• Who owns the translation memory?
• Is your translation memory portable and open-source, or will I be locked into using you in the future?
• Can multiple translation companies access the memory? What are the advantages and disadvantages to a shared memory?

Technology

In addition to translation memory, there are many tools and technologies that facilitate translation and translation management, reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Your RFP should ask:

• What tools and technologies do you use to manage, measure and improve translation work?
• How do you use technology to improve productivity and service?
• How do you stay current with industry technologies and tools? How do you help your clients to stay current?

Pricing

An apples to apples comparison of translation pricing across all suppliers is essential to an objective comparison of suppliers.

Your RFP should ask:

• What are your pricing units? Per source-language word? Per-hour? Per-page? Other? Please define all units.
• Are ALL costs associated with your service included in the pricing matrix?
• Please define the exact process(es) covered in the rate: translation, editing, proofreading, QCing, etc.
• Do rates vary by direction: English into target language vs. Target language into English?
• What is your discount policy for translation memory? Volume discount? Other discounts?

Management Reports

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” You will need regular translation management reports to track performance.

Your RFP should ask:

• How would you track our company’s translation activity in a way that leads to clean, rolled-up management reports?
• Can you provide examples of such reports, in addition to showing us how the reports are generated and accessed?
• Will we have to pay for such reports?

Liability, Errors and Omissions

Managing risk and determining responsibility for translation errors are important business functions.

Your RFP should ask:

• How do you manage the risk of translation errors?
• In the event a translation error is discovered, how do you determine responsibility for the error?
• How do you determine the cost of the error, and who covers that cost?
• Does your company have errors and omissions or liability insurance that covers translation errors? If so, what are the limits?

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Contact info

For more information on how Prisma builds great partnerships with medical device companies, contact us:

Prisma International, Inc.
Main: +1-612-338-1500
info@prisma.com

Download a printable PDF of the 10 Tips to Conducting a Translation RFP here.

Getting Started in Translations—Strategically

Managing translation and localization has become increasingly strategic. Most people by now are familiar with the usual “tactical” advice—develop a good glossary and style guide, leave plenty of white space for text expansion, etc.—but how can you take your translation management to the strategic level?

Following are 10 tips for getting a strategic start to managing translations—one that will ensure you are using best practices, thinking like a global communication manager, and scaling your efforts to optimize your translation ROI.

(For a quick refresher on basic definitions—translation, localization, interpretation, globalization, etc, hover here.)

Recognize that translation is a profession

Some say that translation is the second-oldest profession in the world. Nowadays, it has become the profession of managing critical content for global audiences, carried out by skilled linguists requiring formal education and preparation beyond language proficiency or native speakers. Translation is not an afterthought to writing content in English.

The technologies of the localization field are sophisticated and powerful, and in the right hands, capable of enabling you to reach your customers and content consumers around the world with highly-targeted, culturally-appropriate messages.

But it all starts by recognizing that translation is a profession, and that it must be planned, resourced, and managed using the best business processes and professional practices available.

Think “global” from the start

Managing translations starts with learning to think globally and write for global audiences.

Learn how to develop content for a global audience, and some of the tools. Avoid cultural-centric references and messages. References to parts of the body can be risky. Think of how your users in other countries would use your materials (customer support, regulatory, date formats, currency, etc.)

Recognize that content is a key corporate asset

According to content strategist Rahel Bailie, your corporate content is a key asset, and “as anything in a company that has value, these assets must be stored, managed, and valued....".

Senior managers are rarely tuned into thinking about their translated content as a key asset, and frequently have no idea how to measure translation value or even the value of those managing translations. The result is often the dumping of translation management onto the backs of already-strained technical communicators (“here, deal with this!”) and even less understanding of multilingual content as a strategic corporate asset.

Develop a Translation Strategy

Like most complex things anymore, translation requires a strategy. In fact, that notion can be taken even further upstream to a Content Strategy, of which translation strategy is a major component.

An effective translation strategy takes into account several key components, including:

• Content consumers

  Content consumers A term preferred by Content Strategist Rahel Bailie over end-users, readers, etc.

• Your company’s business processes, culture and limitations
• Technology to manage and deliver the content experience
• The workflows and needs for developing and managing both source- and target-language content (authors, content managers, translators)

Train your Management

Develop a “business case” (what’s this?)

In addition, you will need to build consensus and understanding of the impact of translations across your team or enterprise. Translation cost across many functional areas—from marketing to programming, regulatory to procurement, help desks to engineering. Your business case should consider both the impact on and support needed from each of your critical functional areas.

Consider Quality

Translation quality, like anything involving language, is both art and science. Consider the following strategic questions:

• How do I measure translation quality?
• How do I ensure we are getting quality translations?
• How can I plan for a quality translation process?

A solid translation partner can address many of these questions, but will only be as effective as the partnership allows. Invest up front in framing quality as a central requirement, and work with your translation partner and your own management to build the processes to ensure you get it.

Word$, word$, word$: What to translate?

The basic unit of translation cost is “per word.” So, it makes sense to manage cost by first asking a few basic questions: Does all of our content need to be translated? Might we be just as effective in our communication by translating only relevant sections or documents? Can we use techniques and strategies of minimalism? (what’s this?). Can we reduce translation volume by using images, pictures, and diagrams?

These basic questions can result not only in lower costs, but in sharper, more effective messages for your global audiences.

Translation Metrics I: Setting up to measure performance

Measuring translation performance is key to tracking, improving and optimizing your translation management. Metrics can also be critical to justifying decisions and demonstrating the value of your efforts to a senior management that only speaks the language of numbers.

But what exactly are metrics? Companies use metrics—or measurements and reports—to show performance in many different settings, from manufacturing to profitability, throughput to quality control. Such metrics cover both internal performance and supplier efforts. Business process improvements such as Six Sigma, Lean, and many others are based on effective, thoughtful use of metrics.

Translation metrics are no different: by measuring translation performance, we can improve performance, deliver more value and achieve the best quality possible.

One more thing: If your job includes translation coordination or management, you should be gathering translation metrics to demonstrate to your management the results you are delivering to your company, which then becomes—ideally—the basis for recognition of the value you are delivering as a translation coordinator.

A strategic Translation Partner will make sure you are set up with the right metrics, and offer you a translation portal that captures most of the inputs as work occurs.

Translation Metrics II: Some examples

Translation metrics cover a set of performance factors that span the full gamut of business indices, including:

• Translation Quality
• On-time delivery
• Cost savings via Translation Memory
• Reduction of Help Desk time
• Speed-to-market improvements
• Global customer satisfaction
• Reduction of source word count
• Translation vendor performance

To be most effective, your metrics should be customized to your company’s needs and culture, such as:

• Your divisions or departments
• Your product lines or brands
• Your budget categories
• Your languages by region or geography

A strategic Translation Partner will offer you a metrics-based translation portal that, with or without customization, can set you up with the right metrics to measure, improve and optimize performance—both yours and theirs—over time.

Choose the right translation partner

Not all translation companies think strategically. In fact, most do not.

The most important decision you can make that will affect the success of your translation efforts is to select the right translation partner—one that thinks strategically and who can advise, lead and coach you along the path.

The right partner will give you just the amount of information you need—not drown you in details, or leave you with a lack of communication.

If you’re conducting an RFQ or RFP to select a partner, click here for FREE advice on the right questions to ask.

Contact Info

To learn more about how Prisma builds great translation partnerships, contact us: