3 Must-know Tools for Medical Translators
Medical translation has become more important than ever, especially after the outbreak of the pandemic. It facilitates effective communication between patients and medical professionals when they speak different languages and plays a critical role in timely dissemination of the latest findings of treatments, diagnostics and vaccination in different parts of the world.
In this article, we are going to discuss 3 must-know tools that may help make medical translators’ work easier, namely electronic medical dictionaries, machine translation engines, and translation memory platforms.
Tool 1: Medical Dictionaries
A prominent feature of medical documents is the extensive use of medical, biological and pharmaceutical terminology. The use of quality medical dictionaries providing precise and concise definitions of medical terms (and perhaps offering translation candidates as well) is essential for translators working in the field. Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary is a good example.
If you are more interested in bilingual medical dictionaries (English-Chinese), probably you would like to check out English-Chinese Medical Dictionary, which defines more than 2,000 terms that are compiled by physicians.
Tool 2: Machine Translation
Machine translation, also known as automatic translation platforms, can provide translators with translation drafts, which can be post-edited for publication. While there are free online systems readily available, such as Google Translate and Bing Translator, they are mainly designed for general purposes and may not be suitable for the translation of medical documents, with writing style and terminology different from general text.
As opposed to general translation systems, it may be useful to consider systems that are trained for domain-specific translation tasks. In the context of medical translation, there are two noteworthy systems: The first one is Baidu Translate. Note that users can select the domain of the source text from one of the following: biomedicine, electronic technology, hydraulic engineering, and network literature.
The second one is Sogou Translate, which also allows user to specify the source text domain, although for the time being the system only supports biomedicine and finance.
Tool 3: Translation Memories
Translation memory databases enable us to reuse sentences that have been translated before. The basic idea is simple: We collect bilingual documents and divide them into sentences. We use an alignment tool to align the sentences and generate sentence pairs that are stored in a database system. When we have a new document to be translated, our translation memory system can retrieve similar source language sentences from the database and provide the corresponding target language sentences (as we have sentence pairs) for reference.
In other words, if we translate documents that are contain repetitive expressions (with similar expressions and sentences used within the same document or across documents, as in some medical documents), translation memories could be of help as we can reuse hard work by others and we do not need to translate everything from scratch. The use of translation memories might arguably more reliable than machine translation (at least to some of us) as the information provided by translation memories should be prepared by and/or reviewed by professional translators, as opposed to the output of automatic translation is generated by an algorithm, the internal operation of which is largely unknown to (and perhaps uncontrollable by) users. Still, when using translation memories, it is important to carefully compare the new sentence to be translated and the similar sentences suggested by the computer and ensure that we have made all the necessary changes to the suggested sentences to address the differences. Professional translation memory systems offer useful features highlighting differences between the old and new sentences, in addition to scores indicating the degree of similarity (e.g., 70% or 99%). Note, however, that even for sentences with 99% similarity, we need to read and compare them with care, and we should never overlook the 1% difference, which could have detrimental effect, especially in the context of medical translation.
This article has provided an overview of useful tools for medical translation. Of courses there are many other interesting applicants around for translators in the field, and we can explore them in our future posts. In the meantime, do take care and stay healthy! 😄
