Medical translation

A reader chooses here by the side of moving medical content between languages: how meaning crosses, translating a specialised kind of text, running a translation project, working as a translator, interpreting, and the ethics of the work. It leaves preparing a source for translation and writing English for readers and authors of other first languages to English across languages, the medical writer's own career and specialism, crossing between translation and writing among them, to the profession, and the AI tools themselves, and what writers and the public make of them, to artificial intelligence.

• Meaning across languages — how word meaning crosses languages, what equivalence can and cannot promise, where literal translation fails, what changes when a text moves between languages, and what a bad translation costs
• Translating a specialised kind of text — patient-reported outcome measures, psychological tests, patient materials in plain Russian, veterinary texts, medical devices, and localising pharmaceutical promotional materials
• Commissioning and running a translation — budgeting the languages a document set needs, finding and hiring a translator, running the project, agreeing the depth of revision, assuring quality, what a standard and a certificate cover, the in-house language function, the freelancer's agency project, translation software, and machine translation and AI in the language chain
• Working as a medical translator — what medical translation demands and who does it, the language competence and subject range the work requires, getting into it, its difficulties, choosing where to work, and how the translation market responded to generative AI
• Interpreting and language access — medical interpreting, its modes and preparation, and providing language access in healthcare: who faces a language barrier, what the law requires and building a language access programme
• The ethics of medical translation — where a translator's obligations come from, a code built around five obligations, and what current codes leave out