Medical devices have taken the industry by storm. These devices translate into big business. Statistics show that the market for medical devices was valued at roughly 577 billion dollars in 2022. And the largest medical devices market is none other than the United States of America, valued at about 198 billion dollars in 2022.
Since the U.S. is the largest producer of medical devices, it exports them to countries around the world. The major export market for the United States of America is Europe including countries like the Netherlands and Germany. With Europe being home to 24 official languages, the need for medical translation is evident in this area.
In fact, if you look at the entire medical devices market and the global nature of today’s business, the requirement for translation seems never-ending. Manufacturing companies want to tap into foreign countries and attract international users. But when it comes to truly globalizing their innovative medical devices, they require the expertise of a medical device translation agency.
Best practices for medical device translation
Translating medical devices demands absolute precision and accuracy. If done wrong, your entry into foreign markets can become a nightmare.
Therefore, it’s vital to follow best practices that would yield quality outcomes during the translation process. Here are a few of them to make your life easy:
Provide clear instructions in a concise way
Have you ever gone through the application process of the FDA, short for the Food and Drug Administration in America? If your company intends to seek device approvals across the border, expect extra regulatory barriers hindering your way. However, turning to online medical translation services or agencies is a great way to overcome them.
If you want to make the whole process seamless, then creating clear and concise instructions becomes very crucial. It’s also equally important you keep costs as reasonable as possible.
The prime example of this case is the European market which has a long list of linguistic requirements. If you can produce translations that are concise and use plain language, you can help your business avoid many complications.
Use professional medical writing techniques
The projects that involve medical text need excellent attention to detail, clarity, and briefness. What does this mean? It means you must keep acronyms at bay in your translations.
These acronyms and abbreviations are different in different languages. So, if you get rid of them somehow, it would be easy for you to move your documents from one language to another.
Similarly, you should avoid using idioms, phrases, and any fancy wording in your content. Why? It’s hard to translate them well across languages.
If a simpler word choice is available, why turn to complex vocabulary? Your focus should be to get the message across while making simple linguistic choices. That said, any slang or colloquial terms should never find a way into your translations.
Seek the expertise of human medical translators
It might be tempting to use machine translation for quick results. But machine translations are usually word-for-word with lots of contextual mistakes. Being a medical device company, you can’t afford such mistakes.
But even if you employ human translation, still you can run into grave errors and mistakes. It happens when you hire a professional translator with no expertise in the medical field.
Let’s say you have designed a medical device for surgical equipment in the life science industry. As this industry looks to improve and save lives, we can’t emphasize how accurate the translation in life science should be. If the translation isn’t accurate, it can result in an improper use of the device, which can have serious consequences. Therefore, it’s best to leave your project to someone who has experience in your specialty area and can deliver the best results.
Make medical labels as clear and jargon-free as you can
For the best medical device labeling translations, you should steer clear of any industry jargon and lingo on your labels. Because the margin for error is extremely low in this field, try to make sure your target readers would easily read and understand your device labels, that too at first glance, in their native language.
If you must include symbols on the device labels, it’s best to use internationally known symbols so that there is no confusion around. The device labeling looks attractive and catches the attention if you incorporate well-known symbols.
Ensure your translation meets local device regulations
The documentation requirements related to medical devices vary from region to region. So, you should stay current on them for the markets you’re providing your services in.
But the medical device sector is pretty massive. Local regulators continuously change and update the regulations in order to handle emerging device sectors and new technologies, etc.
So, keeping track of them would be tough. Therefore, we always recommend hiring an experienced linguistic agency with a medical background. Having translators with deep knowledge of the medical industry aspects, they take care of different national device regulations in an effortless manner.
