Case Study : Scaling translation workflows without compromising quality

Client Overview

A global organization ran multilingual healthcare and medical research projects across markets, where translated materials needed to be accurate, appropriately localized for the target market, and delivered within tight research timelines.

The Challenge

Managing research translations at scale came with several challenges.

Market research projects often operated on compressed timelines. Translated materials had to be readied quickly, so that surveys could be launched and responses could be collected without delaying the overall project. Despite these tight deadlines, translations had to go through appropriate quality checks before being delivered to the end-client. 

In healthcare research, a medicine or medical term familiar to respondents in one country was not always recognized exactly in the same manner, in another market. The translation therefore needed to be localized so that respondents understood the terminology in the context of their own market; without changing the intended meaning of the original material. 

Medical translation required a level of subject-matter expertise beyond basic grammatical fluency. The team needed translators who understood medical terminology, medicines and their usage in local markets, and who could make informed decisions about when a medical term should be translated and when it should remain in English. With a pool of specialist translators available, another challenge was matching each project with the right expertise. The quality of the final translation depended on selecting translators with relevant experience in medical content and a strong understanding of the target market. 

Our Approach

myTranscriptionPlace built its translation workflow around speed, specialist expertise and rigorous translator selection.

1. Identifying the nature of the project

The team first reviewed the research materials (screeners, discussion guides and other stimuli) to understand whether the project involved medical or healthcare content. This allowed the team to determine the skill-level of specialist expertise required, before assigning the work.

2. Matching projects with specialist translators

Projects were assigned based on translators' previous experience, subject-matter knowledge and familiarity with medical content. The translator pool included professionals with over a decade of medical translation experience, as well as medical students and retired healthcare professionals. This gave myTranscriptionPlace access to translators who understood both the language and the subject matter.

3. Localizing for the target market

The translators focused on making the material understandable and recognizable to the target audience while preserving the original meaning. For healthcare studies, this included understanding local medicine names and terminology and making appropriate decisions about which terms should be translated or retained in English.

4. Working to compressed timelines

Despite the short turnaround requirements typical of market research projects, the team delivered all files within 24 hours / one business day, regardless of the number of words or languages involved. This helped keep the translation workflow aligned with the client's broader research timelines.

Results

The partnership delivered translation at scale without compromising the focus on specialist quality.

The result was a translation workflow that could handle a high volume of research material while meeting the speed and subject-matter requirements of multilingual research.