Medical & Legal translation - The quality mania!

Medicine is one of the most complicated technical domains. The topic is vast - includes all types of living organisms. The need for medical translation is multi fold - a medical report written in French might need to be translated to English for a doctor in UK to understand, notes of a medical conference in Germany might need to be translated to French, the te xt of a medical software might require translation to/from Chinese and so on.. Translating content in the medical domain is not every translators' cup of tea. As the domain is very specific, so the Medical translator must be an expert in the domain. As the field is vast, so the translator must be an expert in his/her micro field to be able to translate content in that field/domain. Owing to globalization and knowledge sharing across the world, the demand for professional medical translation services is on the rise. An equally challenging domain for translation is legal. We have numerous court case transcripts, lease deeds, certificates, FIRs etc that need to be converted from one language to another. For example, FIRs in the northern part of India are written in Hindi and need to be converted to English for a non-Hindi speaker to understand. Thus, a legal translator must be an expert in the domain and must be conversant with the terminology and specific words used in legal documents. As such, owing to demand, we observe a new Legal translation agency coming up almost daily with its offerings! Owing to the critical nature of medical and legal domains, the quality of such translations has to be exceptionally good. A small error in a medical translation can lead to huge misinterpretations and a 'tiny' mistake in legal translation can lead to wrong court judgement. Thus, the medical / legal translator must have a strong inclination towards quality and must read between the lines to provide an accurate, clear and precise representation of the source in the target language.

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