Medical Translation Services for South African Languages

Medical translation services typically involve Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) and community engagement programmes with informative materials translated into regional languages i.e. Afrikaans and isiXhosa for participants in Cape Town and the Western Cape.

Clinical research translators

Medical translations present a particular set of challenges for translators. Through our experience of working in partnership with this sector, particularly in research and development into HIV and TB treatment in South Africa, we have built a core team of specialised medical translators for all 11 South African languages to respond to these challenges. Our translators understand the nuances of medical terminology and cultural contexts, ensuring accurate and accessible translations.

Effective communication is crucial in the medical sector: every day, health researchers and practitioners must deliver and receive complex information and sensitive patient data with clarity and accuracy across linguistic and cultural divides. Organisations researching new vaccines, drugs and procedures for fighting HIV and TB need to reach support staff, caregivers and patients in their home languages, to obtain informed consent or to explain medical procedures. With our medical translation services, you can be confident that your messages will be accurately translated and conveyed in the appropriate tone.

Translations play a crucial role in facilitating this informational exchange. Medical translators must therefore be equipped with both specialised knowledge of the medical field, as well as situational understanding of the social and cultural context of target communities. Our team of medical translators possesses these skills, allowing us to provide accurate translations that are culturally appropriate for each target community.

User-friendly translations

In this critical sector, translators must ensure that their translations are completely faithful to source texts, as well as ‘user-friendly’ and accessible to patients and participants with no medical expertise. Incorrect language usage (even by qualified translators) lacking specialist knowledge and experience, or without an understanding of the linguistic and cultural orientations of participants, can seriously reduce the efficacy of medical research and practice. With our user-friendly translations, we ensure that all patients and participants can understand the medical information presented to them.

The challenge for any clinical research translation service is to identify and agree on the range of terms that facilitate both accurate and comprehensible translation from the source language into the target language. Informed consent forms, medical trial reports and other crucial materials used on the ground all need to work with widely accepted, internally consistent and easily comprehensible language to ensure successful research and treatment. Our team of medical translators is trained to identify and agree on these terms, ensuring accurate and easily understandable translations.

Our medical translation team are all specialists in their field, working within an internally consistent framework which is in line with accepted practice and regulatory guidelines. With our expertise, you can be confident that your medical translations are in safe hands, accurately translated and accessible to all target communities.

Clients