Achieving and maintaining a quality service

Standard project workflow

• translation → factual editing → terminology consultations → proofing and consistency check
• DTP → final proofing → matchprint/test → QA by the Client
• pre-press and printing

To ensure that projects proceed smoothly and are completed on time, we assign a Project Manager to each.

Focused on specialty medical documents

Our team of translators and editors makes use of our large library of resources and translation tools in order to ensure that terminology, style and quality remain consistent throughout each project.

High-quality life-science translation requires staff with specialist skills. Today we live in an era of evidence-based medicine, marked by narrow fields of specialization and an increased use of technology. To provide a quality service, therefore, translation companies must combine a practical knowledge of the subject with scientific expertise and linguistic proficiency. The Polish Biomedical Translation Center is one of the few companies to have achieved this.

Why place so much focus on specialisms? A surgeon reading a text will generally not be familiar with the special terminology used to describe laboratory medicine. It is even more unreasonable, therefore, to expect a language school graduate to deliver a high-quality translation of a text dealing with ventricular rhythm disorders, the adverse effects of chemotherapy, or the beam configuration menu of a CT scanner. A biomedical translation which is not reviewed by a specialist with a knowledge of the document’s subject is bound to contain errors – either as a result of misunderstandings or over-literal or ‘improvised’ dictionary translations. Such misinterpretations are not only very time-consuming and costly to correct, they are likely to have legal and/or financial repercussions.

The secret of our success is the fact that we only employ experienced translators with degrees in medicine, pharmacology, chemistry and other life sciences. This skilled team is further supported by a team of industry experts, including researchers and clinicians from universities all over Poland and the rest of Europe, providing terminology consultations and specialist reviews.

Consistency in terminology and style

To ensure customer satisfaction, we have also developed a scrupulous quality assurance system. This is a much more advanced strategy than that employed by many other translation companies, who only make use of part-time translators. This multi-stage quality assurance mechanism ensures that every project is checked by two independent experts to verify its accuracy and quality. As a result, every translated text also receives:

1. A round of content-related factual editing – the translated text is reviewed by a professional editor (an MD who is a full time translator) and, if necessary, a terminology consultant
2. A round of linguistic editing – the translation is independently checked and proofread by an experienced biomedical editor.

Is such complicated multi-stage approach necessary? Yes! To produce a quality translation, the first draft always requires further editorial cycles – even if the piece was translated by an expert physician with a thorough command of both languages. Companies which fail to recognize this will tend to produce poor quality translations.