Medical Translation Insight

The current issue of Regulatory Focus contains an interesting article entitled Risk: History, Probability and Management.

Nowadays, risk management is firmly established across medical device and pharmaceutical companies. It is hard to remember/imagine our work without it.

That makes it fascinating to read that the idea of risk management started almost 1,000 years ago. Max Sherman, the article's author, does a nice job recounting major milestones reached by various mathematicians over the past several hundred years to turn the early concepts into today's notion of risk management.

To better understand the application of risk management principles in the translation business, the following resources are good starting points for further reading:

• Risky Business! Risk Management for Localization Project Managers provides a good overview of the topic.
• Anthony Pym's PowerPoint presentations on the topic are not to be missed; here are three of them that he gave at conferences in Bergen, Brussels, and Montreal.
• Many translation suppliers experience risk management with their medical device clients; our recent post on risk-based software validation provides insight.