CASE STUDY: Medical Translation

While many companies trust NZTC International with translation of very important information, some of the most critical translations are for our clients in the medical equipment manufacturing sector. This is because their documents contain instructions that if carried out incorrectly could mean the difference between life and death.

A good example of this is our translation work for Ventracor Limited, a global medical device company which produces the VentrAssist® implantable blood pump, a new “third generation” left ventricular assist device (LVAD), designed as an alternative to heart transplantation for people with heart failure (www.ventracor.com).

The Ventracor communications team takes great care with producing clear and effective instructions for patients and clinical staff and accordingly, NZTC takes great care to ensure its translations are as accurate as possible.

NZTC’s Quality Assured Translation (QAT) process is particularly effective for translation of such important patient and clinical instructions, with a key feature of this process being our editorial stage involving a stringent review of the translation through a form of back translation by an expert in both the source and target languages. This is one of the most effective ways we can ensure all instructions have been understood and translated correctly.

For this type of work, NZTC employs translators who are skilled technical writers, as well as being experienced in translation of medical documentation. NZTC’s medical translators are supported with extensive medical reference material and we have employed a medical doctor to assist us with development of our foreign language terminology databases.

While NZTC’s QAT process involves very intensive quality controls, as additional peace of mind for medical translations we undertake an extra final check and sign-off process that targets critical areas of the document such as key numbers, volumes, warnings, cautions and contraindications.

The steps we follow for medical translation are much more stringent than “industry standard” translation processes, but are well worth the extra time and effort when translating information that literally can have life or death consequences.