Medical Translation Insight

We all know that words can have different meanings and can be difficult to translate. But who knew that words have tasts, too?

Words can evoke thoughts of different colors, sizes, shapes and even tastes, scientists have claimed. It had previously been thought that only 1% of the population had synaesthesia, a condition which makes people see shapes and colors when reading words.

For more on this "scientific breakthrough", head on over to news:lite.


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Schlafender Hase's widely-used Text Verification Tool (TVT) ensures that only the approved text is printed without any undesired deviations.

The latest version, TVT 5.0, adds support for all major languages, including Japanese and right-to-left reading languages. TVT compares the text on labels with the draft version highlights inconsistencies, missing paragraphs, and hyphenation errors in each version.

Schlafender Hase claims that its software can check documents at a rate of 150 pages in 15 seconds and can compare multiple leaflets in different languages at the same time.

In addition to DOC, RTF, TXT and PDF, TVT supports both XML standards PIM and SPL, endorsed by the European and the US regulatory authorities, EMEA and FDA.

For additional information, visit tvt.text-verification.com.


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Nine months ago, Brand Week ran a good article on why pharma fears social networking. In the time since the article first ran, little seems to have changed.

Pharmaceutical (as well as medical device) companies lag far behind other industries in the adoption of "Web 2.0" technologies like social networking, blogs, wikis, podcast and RSS.

While English-language drug brand web sites are common, they almost never contain the features that marketers usually are desperate to give their customers: bulletin boards, chat rooms, blogs and social networking functions. To see how static and "boring" drug sites are, check out Eli Lilly's Cialis, Sepracor's Lunesta, Pfizer's Viagra, and sanofi-aventis' Allegra.

There are some exceptions, including J&J's Children with Diabetes and Diabeteshandprint.com, which we previously mentioned in our post on crowdsourcing translations, where companies have created online communities. But as Brand Week's article points out, pharma companies are generally not comfortable with the risks and investments required for these kinds of sites.

Just how slowly things are progressing has been highlighted over the past few weeks. During this time, pharma's dabbling in social media took two steps forward and one step backward.

Glaxo launched a new corporate blog and Twitter is getting a bit of traction amongst drug manufacturers. During the same period, though, J&J had to remove a video from its health channel after running afoul of FDA.

So, how far behind are pharma and device companies? A recent report found that 16% of Fortune 500 companies have public-facing blogs -- yet only two drug and device companies maintain blogs and a handful more tweet.

Given how conservative and risk-averse drug and device companies are, the situation is unlikely to change soon. Hey, pharmaceutical and medical device companies don't even speak Spanish!


UPDATE: AstraZeneca, Roche as well as pharma marketers and consultants were featured in the September 2009 PharmaVoice story The Business of Tweeting.


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As we recently saw, English can be easy to mess up. This is true whether or not you are a native speaker.

So if you are out there struggling with English grammar and punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is for you.

Even if you think that your punctuation is dead-on, check out this book. How often does a book about punctuation and grammar become a bestseller?!?


For expert medical translations of regulatory, clinical, and marketing content in 40+ languages, request a detailed proposal from ForeignExchange Translations.
 
 

We recently mentioned glossifier, a tool to explain medical texts.

If you would like to learn about medical terminology on a more ongoing basis, check out the various "medical word of the day" blogs and newsletters that are out there. One of the ones I like is ubiquity's Medical Technology Launch Blog. They cover interesting and random medical words. Check it out at www.ubiquity-design.com/wordpress/.


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After five short months, our little blog is a big success! The several hundred readers are generating close to 300 pageviews every day. A big THANK YOU to all of the readers, folks who post comments, and people who suggest topics for our posts.

To make the blog more user-friendly, we have added two enhancements:

1. Readers who use our RSS feed can now also subscribe to our comments.
2. We have added a search box that allows you to search for any term or combination of terms via Google's custom search function.

Thank you again for your support - and if you have any ideas for topics, please drop us a line.

Yesterday's Washington Post featured a good article on the efforts of Google Translate and DARPA's Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use systems to master automated translations.

An interesting part of the story was the look at translation quality. What does constitute "good enough" when it comes to quality - whether it's human or machine translation?

While there can be endless discussion as to where the goal line should be place, the fact is that the quality gap between machine and human translation is narrowing.

Here is one excerpt from the article:

"Human translators aren't actually that great," Waibel says. In one study, people listened to a machine interpreter and then were asked questions to measure their grasp of content. The score was 64 on a 100-point scale. Not wonderful. But when they did the same test with a human simultaneous interpreter, the result was not a lot better -- a 74.

"When humans try to figure out how to translate one thing, they drop their attention as to what's coming in the next graph," Waibel says. "And they're human. They get tired. They get bored."

The same is true with written translations. Most human translators produce better quality output than machines but does the difference matter?


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Like most subject areas, medical translation is not easy to learn or break into.

In the past, novices to the field could attend workshop or try distance learning or endeavor to find a book on the topic.

But now the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, offers an online master course in medical translation (English to Spanish).

Noting that the area of medical translation has received little attention from academia, a group of the university's researches have created TradMed, "an essential tool for information, training and communication to students, researchers and professionals in the field".

While this sounds like a terrific effort, the usefulness of the TradMed web site is limited because of dozens of broken links. Hopefully, these will be fixed in the near future.


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Since the late 1970s, when research on translation memories began, and the late 1980s, when the first commercial translation memory (TM) products became available, there have been few major breakthroughs which have led to new tools designed to support the activity of human translators. Instead, most research in the field has focused on improving existing tools, be it translation memories, full machine translation, terminology databases, alignment editors, monolingual spelling or grammar checkers, voice recognition, workflow management, etc.

The results have been encouraging, often allowing translators and translation firms to work more efficiently and effectively. But have all the needs of translation practitioners been fully satisfied? Beyond the recycling of full-sentence repetitions and their so-called fuzzy matches, are there new avenues left to explore?

It doesn't seem like it. Search Google for "translation technology" and marvel at how few of the 20 million results are interesting - let alone useful.

So it's nice to see the Twelfth Machine Translation Summit providing a forum for the discussion of new tools for translators. The summit is organized by the International Association for Machine Translation and the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, and it will be held at the Château Laurier, Ottawa, Canada, 26-30 August 2009.


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Guest article:
By B.J. Epstein
Swedish-to-English translator
Contact her via www.awaywithwords.se and http://brave-new-words.blogspot.com


As a translator, I have done a wide variety of work - financial reports, short stories, legal documents, websites, cookbooks, articles, dissertations, and more. But I have only once done a medical translation and that was a very unusual situation (my beloved grandfather had come to visit me in Sweden, gotten quite sick, spent his entire first day in the hospital and then was sent back to the U.S. the next day, and I translated the records from his stay at the Swedish hospital for his doctor back home).

Other than that, I have stayed away from medical translation work, partly because of the bad memories it brings up and partly because I simply do not feel qualified to do it, and I think it is important to recognize one's strengths and weaknesses as a translator.

Early on in my career, I wanted to try everything and learn about all the areas I could, but now I have understood that it is best to specialize. Specializing is both more profitable for me (my expertise helps me get the work out more quickly and at a higher quality) and more useful for clients (I ask them fewer questions and am less likely to make errors in fields that I am very familiar with).

While I greatly admire medical translators, I think I'll stick to literary, culinary, and cultural translation!


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While general medical device companies are still waiting for e-labeling, the European Commission's guidance MEDDEV 2.14/3 REV 1 "Supply of IFU and Other Information for IVD Medical Devices" opened the door for in-vitro diagnostics manufacturers with professional-use products to place their Instructions for Use (IFU) online instead of placing multilingual paper inserts inside product packaging.

Since then, IVD companies have been carefully evaluating their labeling options. While not having to print IFUs in 20+ languages represents a huge cost savings, "alternative" approaches to labeling present challenges in their own right.

The current issue of IVD Technology contains an informative article on the subject. "Making instructions for use available in Europe" discusses the the pros/cons of common labeling approaches.

Particularly interesting is this comparison of different operational, regulatory, environmental and user-related aspects (click image for larger version):


The main challenge in providing non-paper instructions is that IVD manufacturers must provide a toll-free number to the user. While some efforts are underway to standardize pan-European help and hotline numbers, setting up a single, consistent freephone number across Europe is a herculean task.

As the article notes:

Each of the 31 countries has its own telephone companies, which work within their national context. Thanks to international agreements, an international 800 number system exists, but it cannot be used in all countries. Moreover, it has to be activated in each individual country and monthly fees paid for each country.

But where there is a challenge, there is a business opportunity. Today, there exists a cottage industry around providing freephone services to IVD manufacturers.


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Over the past week, the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) has updated a couple of documents related to e-submissions:

First off, the Telematics Implementation Group for electronic submission and ICH Implementation (TIGes) has agreed on a final draft of a harmonized guidance document for the submission of eCTD. This document is adopted by all MS represented in the TIGes, and applicants submitting any eCTD submission to any agency for any procedure should follow the recommendations laid out in the document.

As a follow-on, the EU Telematics EU eCTD Change Request/Q&A Tracking Table [Excel file] was updated. The table contains updates resulting from the publication of the harmonized guidance but other assorted changes.


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The pharmaceutical industry faces enormous challenges — from changes in how pharmaceutical companies develop and source products, to pricing pressures, to increasingly stringent regulatory environments. As a result, the heads of enterprise architecture (EA) within drug companies are examining their priorities so that they can support their organizations in this time of change.

Forrester's recent report Pharmaceutical Industry Trends Drive EA provides a good look at some of these challenges.

One thing that was particularly interesting was IT decision makers' response to the question of "What is the importance of the following IT drivers over the next year?". One of the responses labeled as critical by the most people was the need to "support regulatory requirements".

On the other hand, maybe this doesn't come as a surprise. Despite efforts to harmonize global pharma regulations, drug companies complain loudly and often about the inconsistent regulatory rules that different countries use. Successful IT governance requires that IT operations be aligned with the objectives of the overall pharma business, and regulatory considerations remain a top priority for IT decision makers.


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For years, the talk about the coming age of crowdsourcing in translation seemed like a bunch of hype. But when the New York Times writes a piece on the topic, it's time to pay attention.

Today's article A Web That Speaks Your Language highlights efforts by TED and Global Voices to use crowdsourcing as a way to make content available much more broadly, by translating it for speakers of other languages.

The Times article highlights interpreters earning $100,000 annually who also volunteer their time for the Global Voices project. Even more interesting is TED's experience of successfully switching from using professional translators to crowdsourced volunteers - and saving $500,000 in the process.

So, does crowdsourcing translation work for pharmaceutical and medical device companies? Maybe.

Beyond the concerns of companies entrusting their strong corporate brands and style to unknown volunteers, the bigger issue is that people are going to be less likely to offer translations for corporate materials in which they hold no stake and have no emotional investment. For instance, it's unlikely that companies could crowdsource the translation of packaging and labeling information.

Crowdsourcing translations really comes into its own when you think of it in a social networking context. As the experience of Facebook has shown, for-profit companies can leverage the enthusiasm and language skills of their user base to achieve their business goals.

Drug and device companies are increasingly venturing into social networking. Sites such as J&J's Diabeteshandprint.com have communities of users who are hugely passionate about what they consider to be "their" sites given that content is contributed to and generated by themselves. They would therefore have a real interest in feeding into the translation process.

The viability of crowdsourcing is giving rise to translation companies like myGengo that are structured to offer clients the best of both worlds: low rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced translations and some level of accountability and quality control.

So, are crowdsourced translations the future of our business? Probably not. Will crowdsourcing play a role in some sectors of the translation business? Probably.

---

UPDATE: Newsweek ran an article on TED's Open Translation Project this past Friday. Thanks for the tip, Rina!

---

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The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) has released its 26th annual list of the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. patents.

The Patent Docs blog then used this list to compile a list of the 43 top biotech, medical device, and pharma organizations receiving U.S. patents in 2008. Each organization's IPO top 300 ranking for 2008 is indicated in the "'08 IPO Rank" column; the IPO top 300 ranking for 2007 (if available) is indicated in the "'07 IPO Rank" column.



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SEMIA, the South Eastern Medical Interpreters Association, will host the 2nd annual Southeast Regional Medical Interpreter Conference in Lexington, KY, on June 18 and 19, 2009.

Cindy Roat will be the keynote speaker. Cindy was involved in developing "Bridging the Gap", one of the premier medical-interpreting training programs.

Conference information is available on SEMIA's web site. Registration is hosted on the web site of the Medical Interpreter Network of Georgia (note: use Internet Explorer; pages don't display properly in Firefox).


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XBench is an amazing tool created by Spanish translation company ApSIC, primarily as a way to view and check terminology in glossaries or exported translation memories. XBench can be used by translators to ensure consistency between glossaries and TMs. Also, it contains a powerful QA function which will QA an 'ongoing translation' (i.e., edited files) against a TM and glossary and identify any mismatches. It also identifies any numerical mismatches.

At ForeignExchange Translations, XBench plays an important role in our Metriq quality system. We rely on it to:

1. support linguists during translation (instead of checking an Excel glossary or having MultiTerm running in the background, linguists use XBench - they can even combine lookups with Internet searches for a given term!);
2. analyze changes made edit, proofread, and client in-country review;
3. act as a QA check tool (we check for adherence to terminology, untranslated segments, inconsistencies in target/source segments, making sure that products names are not changed, tag and numeric mismatches);
4. check quality of TMs (e.g., checking for duplicates, untranslated segments, inconsistencies) and matching terminology between TMs and glossaries.

Amazingly enough, XBench is a free download from the ApSIC web site. A good overview of its functionality and use are available at Openoffice.org.

If you haven't yet tried XBench, check it out. Highly recommended stuff!


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And now for something completely different...

Yesterday, MedGadget took a detour from their usual fare of medical technology news to mention a post in the Pink Tentacle blog about a story from the July 2001 issue of Geijutsu Shincho magazine about the history of wooden birth dolls in Japan.

It does seem a little morbid but at the same time it would be an awesome teaching tool and the detail (check out the pictures at Pink Tentacle) is just amazing.

In London, the Wellcome Collection has a small collection of similar teaching aids. It's a museum of medical stuff, both old and new. The exhibit includes small (European) ceramic dolls as well as almost-lifesize wood and fabric abdomen complete with baby, placenta, umbilical cord, and membrane. Well worth the visit on your next trip to The Smoke.

Still looking to delve deeper into the weird side of anatomy? Morbid Anatomy is for you.


ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translations for regulatory submissions, labeling, and safety reports - in Japanese and dozens of other languages. Contact us to find out more.
 
 

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.

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As a web publisher, you won't find many translation companies eager to tell you not to localize your web site. But, the fact is, there are some very good reasons why it may not be in your best interest:

1. Translation is free on the Internet
When it comes to international content you have three options:

1. Mirror your English site;
2. Base content on a subset of the English site; or
3. Develop unique content for each target market.

Sites that offer well-written, jargon-free, simple content may wish to consider using one of the free Internet-based translation services (such as Google Translate) as an attractive alternative. Beyond being free, these services offer a wide range of languages that do not require updating if the underlying site changes.

For smaller companies this alternative provides an ideal way to "get your feet wet" with minimal investment of resources. But keep in mind that the quality of the translation varies greatly and that the more complex your site, the more prone to mistranslation this process is.

Sites with social networking aspects are increasingly turning to crowdsourcing translations. TED's Open Translation Project is said to have saved the organization $500,000 in translation spending.

2. Low return on investment
Whether or not to translate a web site is a business decision and it should be treated as such. Some companies are getting swept up in the mad dash to localize their web sites without looking at the underlying financials.

For companies that are in very small niche markets or companies that will do business in the domestic market only, providing a multilingual site may be a waste of time and money.

Similarly, a lot of companies decide to forgo a multilingual web presence when marketing to Hispanic consumers in the U.S.

Also, many companies lose sight of the expense following the initial translation of a web site. If a company's business model calls for fresh content through regular updates, a substantial investment in technology and translation services will be needed to carry this across multiple languages.

To maintain a multilingual Internet presence, companies budget around $50 per page per language per update. A small site with 60 pages in four foreign languages undergoing three updates per year would need to budget a minimum of $36,000 for maintenance of its multilingual web presence. A company may simply be too small (or underfunded) to sustain this kind of ongoing expense.

3. English is lingua franca
Despite the protests of "us-first" movements in France, Switzerland, and other countries, English is slowly but steadily gaining ground as the world's lingua franca.

And in a few business sectors, English really is the main language being used. One example is international currency trading. For companies supporting this industry, a multilingual web site might not make sense. If your customers don't want or need a translated site, you should think twice before creating one.

4. Insufficient resources to service international users
Companies run the danger of getting caught in the multilingual web hype. "I want to sell globally and so I need a multilingual web presence," the argument goes. This may be true but it is not the whole picture.

Once it is determined what you want, the real question is what can you afford? As we discussed a a few months ago, the successful planning for web localization is no small feat. Consider the following:

• Who will your support foreign customers? Issues like language-skills, time zones, and accessibility will become important.
• How will international distribution be handled?
• Who will reply to incoming emails, faxes, and telephone calls from abroad? Having a Spanish web site, for example, is like telling the world at large: "We speak Spanish. Come and talk to us."

Web globalization is not a one-time undertaking. By committing resources to today, you are in fact committing tomorrow's resources as well. And these resources are significant, especially if a site contains anything more sophisticated than text and tables.

One way to solve this dilemma is to prioritize translation spending. Scrutinize the revenue potential, Internet connectivity, size, and translation expense for various prospective international markets, and base the go/no go decision on this analysis.

5. Who is responsible?
Many companies lose sight of the demands that a globalization effort will place on the organization. Does the required breath and depth of skills exist? What functions or departments need to be shored up with additional staff? Will internal politics and turf wars sabotage the venture?

Web translation may reside in any one of a number of different departments: Marketing, Engineering, International, New Media, Information Systems, Communications, R&D, etc. Across software companies, there does not appear to be a commonly chosen "place" or person responsible. Responsibility winds up with whomever doesn't move fast enough to get out of the way.

This has the undesirable effect that translation often is not managed effectively. The best people and resources are put on other projects with higher profiles, leaving localization efforts to fall short of its goals.

6. Bad timing
The risk of entering too late (i.e., competitors are already established) must be balanced with the cost of rushing into a market too early (i.e., when no market exists yet). In many online segments, companies invest substantial resources into being first. Because this involves venturing into uncharted territory, your competitors may benefit by learning from (and avoiding) your expensive mistakes.

Enter the world with open eyes
While you cannot afford to ignore the global market if you wish to maintain your leadership position, you can still exercise a healthy understanding of the demands and potential pitfalls to building a multilingual web presence. Carefully analyze the situation before committing your company's resources.


More resources? Sure, we have more resources:

• As a follow-up to this article, we took a look at why international web sites fail.
• Drug and device companies are saying "no gracias" to Hispanic marketing, online or offline.
• Web usability is a big topic anyway but when sites get translated, its importance multiplies.

Need expert web localization services for your medical device and pharmaceutical company? Ask ForeignExchange Translations for a quote.
 
 

The Medical Spanish Podcast web site is a terrific resource for all maters related to English/Spanish medical translation and terminology.

The site features discussion forums, polls, and yes, podcasts related to medical news as well as Spanish grammar. Several podcasts are produced every month, and all of them are available in MP3 and AAC format.

[Thanks to the Ponto de Tradução blog for the tip!]


Why do leading medical device and pharmaceutical companies entrust their Spanish medical translations to ForeignExchange Translations? Our process allows for known translation quality in the shortest amount of time. Ask us how!
 
 

This is really cool: Mox's blog posts cartoon about the translation profession.

Written by Alejandro Moreno-Ramos, an Electromechanical Engineer and English-French to Spanish translator, the blog features two strip per week about the trials and tribulations of Mox the translator.

Highly recommended.

[Kudos to Translation Tribulation blog for pointing this out.]

Just like Brazil did a few months ago, the People's Republic of China will conduct their own language reform and issue a modified list of simplified Chinese characters. The hope is that this will further standardize a language used by billions.

First introduced in 1956, simplified Chinese characters included fewer number of strokes for each character to make it easier to learn. In 1986 the official list of simplified characters contained 2,235 entries.

Many people have felt that the symbols have been oversimplified, which have made the characters more difficult to understand. The upcoming release is intended to help solve this confusion. But don't expect the new characters to be fully restored to traditional Chinese as that would require an entirely new education for the Chinese people.

Importantly, from a translation perspective, this change does not mean that pharmaceutical and medical device companies need to update existing Chinese web sites, software applications, or documentation.


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The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is an ambitious online database that makes traditional Indian medical texts available in languages understandable to non-Indian patent examiners (currently English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish). Through TKDL, these texts (many of them old manuscripts originally written in Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu) can be accessed in a searchable format.

In much of the developed world, "prior existing knowledge" (i.e., to reject a patent application if there is prior existing knowledge about the product) is only recognized if it is published in a journal or is available in a database - not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions, as has been the case with much of Indian medicines, foods, and even yoga poses.

The BBC reported that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the U.S. Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin. The Indian government wants to stop this "bio-piracy".

As of February 2009, EPO patent examiners can compare patent applications with the existing traditional medicine documented in the TKDL and use this information to to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.


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Home Depot's surprise decision to shut down its Hispanic web site highlights the challenges associated with translating web sites in general and with Hispanic web content, specifically. While it's easy to second-guess the move from the outside (Is four months enough time to test the concept? How much would it have cost to maintain the site, now that it was built?), Home Depot executives clearly felt that this was not a good area to spend money on.

As it happens, most pharmaceutical and medical device companies agree.

Drug and device companies have tightened their belts and focused on cutting their overall media spend but Hispanic marketing and branding seem to be particularly hard-hit. For instance, despite the fact that Hispanic-targeted cable TV ads saw a substantial increase in advertising spend in 2008, pharmaceutical companies went the other way: Branded cable ads on Spanish language programming dropped from $1.4 million to under $850,000 and non-branded advertising was nonexistent on Spanish language network and cable TV. It's no wonder that the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) labeled the pharmaceutical industry as the #1 laggard when it comes to spending on Hispanic marketing.

This is despite the fact that the Hispanic population in the U.S. grew to 45 million in 2007 (U.S. Census Bureau). If you're keeping tabs, that's more than 15% of the U.S. population.

As importantly, between 1990 and 2007, U.S. Hispanic buying power grew at a compound annual rate of 8.7 percent (compared to non-Hispanic growth rate of 4.8 percent), says AHAA. Regardless, drug and device companies are largely taking the Home Depot approach and saying "No gracias".

That's not to say that Hispanic marketing is totally absent. As these examples show, companies that sell DTC or OTC products tend to offer token support to Spanish-language marketing and branding.

Nonetheless, for most companies, Hispanic marketing is not worth the effort.


Why do leading medical device and pharmaceutical companies entrust their Spanish medical translations to ForeignExchange Translations? Our process allows for known translation quality in the shortest amount of time. Ask us how!
 
 

April was the busiest month ever for our audio conference program. Attendees joined us for more than 150 events over the course of the month!

In April, the top five events were:

1. Benefits & Risks Throughout the Product Lifecycle: How to Strike a Balance in a Post-FDAAA World


2. Risk-Based Software Validation for Medical Devices


3. Considering Human Factors in Designing Medical Device Trials


4. Phase I Studies with Hepatitis C Compounds in Healthy Volunteers and Patients - Views from Inside


5. Harnessing the Marketing Potential of Social Networking Sites

If you have any suggestions for audio conference topics, send us a note!

Starting in January of 2010, Switzerland will accept eCTD submissions. In preparation for this, swissmedic has launched project SIMES ("Solution for the Implementation and the Management of Electronic Submissions").

swissmedic will largely follow the EU implementation of the ICH specification. The main differences will be in module 1.

While the first e-submissions are scheduled for January 2010, this won't be an all-encompassing switchover. Only certain types of applications will be supported and features like electronic signatures will be implemented in future enhancements.

Go to swissmedic's web site to access information on eSubmissions, project SIMES, and eCTD documentation/news.

As more and more jurisdictions embrace (and sometimes even require) eCTD submissions, translators face new challenges and need to get up-to-speed on the structure and peculiarities of these electronic submissions.


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Searching for language-specific terminology on the Internet can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. WWW Search Interfaces for Translators (wwwsift) promises to make this a lot easier.

The site provides an powerful interface to search the Web for glossaries, parallel texts, abbreviations, idioms, and pictures. wwwsift is designed as one big Google and Altavista hack. It's not super easy to use - you have to play around with the interface to understand the various search options. Help is minimal, and the wwwswift Yahoo group isn't much help.

Despite these challenges, wwwswift is a powerful addition to your terminology management toolkit.

[Tip of the hat to Jost Zetzsche's Tool Kit!]


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Translating Berlin posted this gem yesterday.

Posted in a Hamburg hotel, the sign is a great reminder that:

a) English isn't as easy to learn/use as everybody thinks, and
b) because of a), it pays to hire a professional translator - even for small translations

If you need further "proof" of the craziness in the English language, read this funny list.


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Happy May Day! As we begin a new month, we like to take a look back at the most popular content over the previous month. Here goes:

1. Periodic table of typefaces - This was the 2nd most popular entry in February. Apparently, there are a lot of font geeks out there.


2. Back translations - useful or waste of time? - Strong feelings on both sides of the debate made for a lively discussion.


3. Back translations - tackling discrepancy in meaning - Back translation again, this time a more linguistic angle.


4. International standards for date and time - It's a bit of a surprise that this entry was so popular but there you have it.


5. Bad translations - Rounding out the top five is a look at funny translation problems.

Happy reading and happy weekend!