Medical Translation Insight

Fall is the time for conferences... After reporting on the Medical Localization Roundtable at Localization World and RAPS' Medical Devices & IVDs: A Practical Approach to the Japanese Market event, here are some highlights from TM-Europe International Conference 2009 in Warsaw, Poland.

ForeignExchange's Sandra La Brasca attended the conference, which this year was focused on quality management as well as terminology and translation management in European institutions. Of particular interest were the quality panel and the Warsaw Pact debates.

What is striking when quality is brought up among translation/localization professionals is that while we all recognize that quality is a sine qua non, there still seems to be a sense of awe surrounding the word. Mention of ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality measurement system sparked a lot of interest, particularly because it provides a platform for an objective and systematic quality assessment.

The quality panel gave the participants a chance to discuss and argue about quality and its meanings. Fundamentally, the takeaways were:

• Clarify the requirements
• Define quality milestones and benchmarks
• Put in place a system of checks and balances
• Measure and report

To be truly valuable, quality needs be measurable and closely tied to all levels of the client-vendor relationship.

This created an interesting segue into the Warsaw Pact debate which focused on the relationship between clients and translation service providers. The debate was animated but clearly highlighted the importance of building partnerships with our clients.

Other highlights of the conference were discussions around new translation memory technology, machine translation, and crowdsourced translations.

TM-Europe posted an official conference report. From our perspective, this iteration of TM-Europe offered an excellent forum for professionals of the industry to share views and experiences!


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