Medical Translation Insight

One of the blogs that I enjoy reading is Pete Abilla's shmula. His posts touch on everything from Lean manufacturing to word-of-mouth marketing to Six Sigma. But his main interest lies in the area of operational research known as queuing theory.

What's really cool is that Pete is able to make a mathematical and potentially dry topic fun and relevant to different people. Today's article on waste in the adoption process is a terrific example.

As I was reading his post, two things occurred to me about our business:

1. Absolutely anything can be analyzed, measured, and tracked. If you don't believe me, just take a look at Pete's analyses of oil changes, Build-A-Bear stores, and college basketball.
2. Translation companies that hide behind "you can't measure our work - translation is an art, not a science" have no business being in the medical translation business. Drug and device companies devote huge resources to understanding and improving their processes - including translation.

For medical translation service providers that "get it", this presents an opportunity to improve their project management approaches, streamline their operations processes, and trounce the competition.


ForeignExchange is the only company that provides clients with measurable translation quality. Our METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with known translation quality - on every assignment. Find out more!