Perhaps among all the roles companies that provide language translation services have to play in society today, the most critical is the one they perform for the field of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.

In the medical world where highly technical terminologies exist, only the skills of professionals with scientific and medical backgrounds can be trusted in translating important documents.

The requirements of clients are so strict that they prefer native speakers over somebody who possesses excellent bi-lingual skills.

This is understandable for translation companies because they know that with the countless lives that depend on the services of their clients - hospitals, companies that produce medical equipment, pharmaceutical firms, and clinicians – they need to be punctilious when it comes to accuracy and they need to have a strict zero tolerance for misinterpretations.

One can just imagine the disaster a diagnosis or a psychological evaluation will cause if it was entrusted to the hands of someone who possess excellent bi-lingual skills but knows nothing about medical text.

For both the translation company and the client, producing quality work is not a luxury, but a critical necessity. Translation companies provide language translation service for vial and carton labels, data sheets, technical leaflets, consent forms and medical documentations such as dossiers, data sheets, patents and user guides.

The areas language translation companies usually cover are biostatistics, cardiology, anesthesia, medicine, toxicology, endocrinology, diagnostics, endoscopy and dentistry.

In an effort to market their products to almost half of Americans that speak a language other than English, more and more American companies are acquiring medical translation services.

The percentage of non-English speaking Americans is overwhelming that pharmaceutical companies and health-related businesses are taking steps to broaden their market by adapting a different language.

European companies on the other hand, seek the service of language translation companies because they have to comply with the European Language Requirement before they can sell their medical products to non-European manufacturers.

The ELR stipulates that documents of the products should be translated into the native language of the country where they will be sold and used. For companies who want to export their products to Asia, translation is also an important step they have to take.

Most Asian countries have their own mandatory product safety standards for different product categories, and one of the ways to pass these stiff standards is by making product labels, technical documents, operating instructions and manuals understandable to the natives.

To eliminate the risk of errors in the translation, companies make sure they use only the expertise of translators who are certified professionals from the medical industry or in the field of pharmacy, biomedical science or chemistry.

Most of these PhD-certified translators have been working for a good number of years and are already well versed in the language and jargons prevalent in the medical industry.

Medical and pharmaceutical translation is a highly specialized discipline and an extremely delicate process that should only be carried out by qualified translators.