Medical Translation Insight

Caveat emptor ... buyer beware. As outsourcing within the device and pharmaceutical industries has grown ten-fold in the past 20 years, this 200-year-old doctrine is as relevant as ever.

And as this trend is expected to continue - and even accelerate - industry and regulators have to grapple with the challenges brought on by the growing number of contract services companies offering everything from process validation and facilities qualification to contract manufacturing and compliance expertise. On the other hand, regulatory agencies have to monitor GMP activities within the firms that contract vendor services and goods.

Essentially, everybody involved in the development, manufacturing, and sale of drugs and devices is affected, making vendor qualifications a hot topic and leading compliance issue. Providers of medical translation services are no exception. More and more drug and device companies are improving the process and compliance of their translation supplier qualification process.

We have found two good resources to aid both supplier management staff at medical device and pharmaceutical companies as well as suppliers.

Buyer Beware: A Quest for Vendor Qualification details the "Q.U.E.S.T." approach to vendor qualification:



The five-step process (question - understanding - evaluation - site audit - tracking) is robust enough to help buyers accurately determine whether or not a vendor can provide the necessary goods or services to the required standards. It is also flexible enough that it can be adjusted to just about any company or industry.

The second resource is Marion Weinreb's excellent presentation QA Oversight of Vendor Management. Her audio conference takes a close look at the challenges and success criteria of managing vendors. What's especially helpful is that she provides hands-on information on how to develop, negotiate, and monitor a robust quality agreement.

Poor purchasing decisions negatively affect quality, compliance and financial performance. Medical device, pharmaceutical, and translation companies alike have a shared vested interest in tightly managing the their supplier pool.


ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known medical translation quality. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations.
 
 

The medical device industry is going global on a scale unheard of just ten years ago. As new markets open, device manufacturers are no longer content to let others "test the waters" before jumping in. Companies now make efforts to launch products globally, with packaging and labeling that work seamlessly across borders.

For executives who must manage this process, the pressure is getting worse. For every additional market, there are additional language, regulatory, and logistical issues that must be negotiated. Budgets and schedules are tight; and upper-level management often doesn't understand or appreciate the complexity of the issues involved.

Labeling professionals are on the forefront of this challenge: how to fit multiple languages on products, particularly small ones.

To compound the problem, most languages take up 30% more space than English. The typical medical device company supports between 5 and 25 languages on the package labels.

And as package labels get denser, their clarity suffers, making necessary information harder to find for the customer. Unwilling to increase the size of label stock used (and with it, packaging costs), this shortage of label real estate is convincing companies to adapt new labeling strategies.

Some of the other approaches that are becoming more common include:

• Single-language or regional labeling, i.e., grouping languages by geographic area, depending on the supporting distribution network.
• "Boilerplating" by preprinting some common text on boxes and pouches. This approach frees up much-needed space on the label itself.
• "Pack-to-demand," meaning that a generic label is affixed at the manufacturing facility and that additional more specific labeling and documentation are added at the shipment/distribution point.
• Labeling at the distributor level may or may not be a feasible alternative for certain overseas offices. While there are strong incentives for this approach (handing off part or all translation management, cleaner cost accounting, etc.), there are also significant drawbacks. Affiliate offices may lack the infrastructure, resources, or skills to take on this additional responsibility.

For medical device manufacturers, the prospect of increased inventory expense and materials waste as well as lower production efficiencies is worrisome. But as packaging becomes more and more challenging, successful device manufacturers will innovate to offset additional expenses and, at the same time, look to their packaging and labeling to support the company's identity and brand.


ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translations for medical device IFUs, operating manuals, and product labels.
 
 

Given how widely taste buds vary around the world, it's no surprise how many bad-tasting soft drinks there are.

Two that stand out for me are Dr. Pepper in the U.S. and Rivella in Switzerland. Who drinks this vile-tasting stuff? But that's actually the beauty of it: One person's swill is another person's favorite beverage.

The folks over at Woot made this point rather well. Their recent blog post It's A Soda World After All: A Multicultural Soft-Drink Exploration highlights nine odd-ball (to me, anyway) soft drinks from around the world.

My favorite is the description for Foco Soursop Juice, found in Thailand: After declaring the texture as "watery and chunky" the drink's, the flavor elicits the following:

OH GOD THE SMELL! Sewage, overripe fruit, Vienna Sausages, and floral notes collide in a nuclear assault on your olfactory system. Hold your nose and you might manage to choke down a surprisingly tolerable sip, but then the aftertaste hits and it's over.

But again, different strokes for different folks. Foco Soursop Juice must be popular - it comes in 20+ flavors and has spawned mixed-drink concoctions.

After you're done cultivating the "faint nausea" that has set in after tasting these drinks, be sure to read the comments for Woot's blog post. There are some additional drink treasures in there.

Cheers!


Aside from sampling soft drinks from around the world, ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translation services to pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Contact us to learn more.
 
 

This guest post is contributed by Ashley M. Jones, who writes on the topic of pharmacy technician certification. She welcomes your comments at her email id: ashleym.jones643@gmail.com.


If you want to become a medical translator or transcriptionist, you are probably going to be working from home because it's the most convenient thing to do. It makes financial sense for you and your employer and is a great option if you're a woman with young children who need your care.

But even though working from home has a ton of perks, there are a few things you need to be aware of before you choose this professional option, things that no one will tell you because they want you to believe that work-at-home jobs are a bed of roses:

1. You require tremendous will power: When you work with little or no supervision, you tend to get distracted easily, especially with the easy access to the television and the Internet. So you require tremendous will power to be able to push aside these diversions from work and concentrate on the task at hand so that you do justice to your job. The best way to do this is to set a routine (even though your schedule is flexible) and stick to it every day, no matter what. Just pretend your work space is the office and work as if you were being supervised.
2. People may not take you seriously: When you tend to spend the whole day in your pajamas or in casual clothes because you don't have to get dressed to go to work (and you want to be as comfortable as possible), people don't consider what you do as "a job". They look at you and think you're having a wonderful time, waking up late, working when you please, and not having someone look over your shoulder when you work or having to answer to a boss. They don't realize that your job is just as demanding as the one they do, if not more. So if you're ready to work at home, be ready to disregard this perception as well.
3. Your social life suffers: And finally, unless you make it a point to get out and meet friends and family members once every few days, you'll find that working from home kills your social life. You don't get to meet or interact with other professionals in your field too because you're cooped up at home. And when all your communication is online, you slowly lose your people skills and become a sort of hermit. So ensure that you set aside the weekends to meet and socialize with your friends, family members, and others who work in your profession (so that you can broaden your horizons and improve your knowledge).

In spite of all these drawbacks, working from home is still an advantage if you're able to balance your personal and professional lives and know where to draw the line between the two.

It's not just clinical research that is going global. Pharma sales are also moving from established, mostly Western countries to emerging markets.

The New York Times, reporting on research by IMS Health [PDF link], mentioned that "drug sales in China will outpace those of France and of Germany, while Brazil will be buying more medications than Britain".

Together, the 17 countries listed in the report will contribute as much as $60 billion to pharma industry growth over the next few years:



So, what's the bad news?

The report puts it this way:

"[M]ost global drug companies remain under exposed and under-performing in the pharmerging markets, despite the fact that these new growth engines account for nearly half of the global population."

Indeed, major pharmaceutical companies are significantly under-performing in emerging (aka "pharmerging") markets. The top 15 drug companies together derive less than 10 percent of their sales from emerging markets, according to the IMS report.

The report suggests three key items for drug companies to consider:

1. Acknowledge and address the urgency
2. Understand and embrace the complexity
3. Adapt and tailor your strategy

It's probably no surprise that these suggestions sound an awful lot like the prescription to take advantage of the U.S. Hispanic market.

And IF drug makers wake up and tailor their strategies to the specific dynamics and challenges of each market, providers of medical translation services can look forward to getting more work in those languages.


Are you on Twitter? Follow us at @fxtrans.
 
 

Last week, we wrote about pharmaceutical and medical device companies being asleep when it comes to marketing to Hispanics. One of the reasons could be that Hispanics have such varied and high expectations with regards to online content.

A couple of recent articles on the Engage:Hispanic blog highlight this. Good Content Is Critical For Reaching Hispanics Online points out that while there is a relative lack of quality online content for Hispanics, there are also some real pitfalls associated with creating this content. Number 9 of its ten-point list of tips reads:

9. Avoid using regional Spanish when engaging to national Hispanic audiences.

That's easier said then done, given the complexity surrounding the concept of ethnicity and country of origin of U.S. Latinos.

Another challenge is that Hispanics will scour your website to find mistakes and experience gaps. According to a second Engage:Hispanic article, it's almost a sport for Latinos to compare the English and Spanish versions of web sites.

But as this article highlights, online marketers (certainly at drug and device companies but really at any company wanting to market to Latinos) are faced with an interesting challenge and opportunity: The fact that Hispanics have low expectations when it comes to Spanish-language content makes it increasingly difficult to get Hispanics to even a visit a Hispanic site. At the same time, though, there's an unmet demand for high-quality, culturally relevant Spanish-language content that provide comparable value to the corresponding English content.

So, what are device and drug companies to do? In Marketing and Communications Tips for Pharmaceutical Companies [PDF link], Translation Plus offers some interesting ideas:

1. Focus on the family
2. Plan for the future
3. Build upon disease-specific educational programs
4. Offer more bilingual information
5. Offer culturally adapted translation
6. Highlight and increase plant-based medications

The message is clear: If you decide to market to Hispanics, make sure you allocate sufficient resources and talent to develop good, valuable content. Otherwise, you're better of doing what the pharmaceutical and medical device industries are doing - nothing.


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

Health care, health care, health care... In the U.S., you cannot turn on your computer or TV nor read a newspaper or magazine without getting bombarded with the latest news and views about reforming health care.

Over the course of the protracted health care debate, I would occasionally be struck by some of its similarities to the translation field: both use outdated processes (rewarding sickness in the healthcare field and translate-edit-proof in the translation business), both sectors are marked by an absence of leaders (sure, there are "800 pound gorillas" but no real leaders), and both business lack a workable quality definition.

This last point, in particular, goes beyond the U.S. health care system. In fact, the most recent discussion of this that I saw came from Canada.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal reported on this lack of quality standards of metrics in its report of the recent "Metrics For Healthcare Quality: The Leader's Role" event.

It's amazing: When reading the CMAJ article, you can literally substitute "translation" for any occurrence of "medicine" or "health care" and the article will appear written by a translation professional.

Here is a snipet that should sound familiar to translation professionals:

"Medicine is still very much an art"

Here is another:

"One of the biggest challenges of quantifying health care quality is determining what to measure."

And finally:

"I'm optimistic that there will be a day when we will have objective performance measures"

Just like healthcare professionals, translation service providers need to figure out how to measure and compare the quality of their work - or get turned into a commodity.

To read more on measurable translation quality, take a look at:

• Quality is dead - long live measurable quality
• Measured translation quality - a paradigm shift
• ASTM F 2575-06: A Practical Guide for Achieving Translation Quality
• Why measure translation quality?

ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known translation quality. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations.
 
 

The European Union is set to expand again, this time primarily in south-eastern Europe.

The countries of the Balkan peninsula, having met the requirements for EU inclusion, have applied for EU membership with Croatia and Macedonia getting first priority and Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo close behind. Turkey has already applies as well.

Iceland has applied and, until recently, was considered a shoe-in for membership. However, fall-out from the financial crisis has soured both Icelanders and certain EU member states on membership.

What does this mean for medical device companies? The 2010 Medical Device Directive is placing higher scrutiny on the risks in labeling and software, and it requires translation into the languages for which the device is intended. So if you are planning to sell products in any of the Balkan countries, be prepared to translate into yet more languages...

Want to get a head start? Take a peek at our primer on the languages of the former Yugoslavia.


ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known medical translation quality. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations.

We have recently launched a new and improved audio conference web site. If you haven't visited yet, take a look at www.fxconferences.com.

The new site features easier navigation but the same great content. Here is the list of our top events for February:

1. Clinical Trials: Why is India Irresistible?


2. Japanese Medical Device Submission Requirements & Structure


3. Points to Consider when Presenting Documents for an FDA Inspection


4. Current FDA Thinking on Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies


5. Electronic vs. Paper Data Capture: Which Option is Best for Your Trial?

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

Interested in other popular educational events? Take a look at our top audio conferences for January and December.


For a detailed proposal on your next clinical, regulatory, or marketing medical translation project, contact ForeignExchange Translations.

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies continue internationalize their businesses. One of the side effects is the need to train sales staff, physicians, and patients around the world.

We wrote last week about how to tackle this challenge in general. Computer-based training (aka "e-learning") can be an efficient and effective means to educate a large audience.

But global training presents its own set of hurdles. After all, training is a human process and culture and context need to be considered. And training teams in places as far apart as, say, Mumbai and Munich requires smart setup and proper localization.

Then there is the language component. Sophisticated e-learning programs with voice overs, animations, and video quickly becomes time-consuming and expensive to translate.

Many companies use third-party developers to create their e-learning programs. Is your developer thinking globally? Are they creating modules with translation in mind?

To help device and drug companies (and their developers) streamline international training programs, the ForeignExchange team has published a white paper e-learning without borders. Take a look - and happy training!


ForeignExchange provides specialized medical translations for training courses developed by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Contact us to find out more!

It's a basic question, right? Before we tackle "translation", it makes sense to have an understanding of what language is. Here is Dave Gray's attempt to visualize language:


The image summarizes his synthesis of ideas from a book called Using Language by Herbert H. Clark. The book's publisher, Cambridge University Press, says:

This book argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners - writers and readers - perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. The author argues strongly that language use embodies both individual and social processes.

Take a look at this review to get a sense of the book - and then it's time to get back to translating!

[Via dot-global]


For a detailed proposal on your next clinical, regulatory, or marketing medical translation project, contact ForeignExchange Translations.

Hispanic people are the fastest growing minority population in the U.S., comprising almost 50 million people. However, most companies said they do not socially market to Hispanics. Medical device and pharmaceutical companies are firmly entrenched in this "no gracias" camp.

We last reported on this topic 10 months ago. Since then, support from the drug and device industries seems to have diminished even further. When visitors to PhRMA's web site click on the "En Espanol" link, they are greeted by an error message:



Hispanic Market Weekly noted the same thing recently. Pharma Still Not Losing Sleep Over Hispanics wonders:

What makes a Hispanic person any less of a patient?

This leaves me scratching my head. There exists a significant untapped marketing potential for pharmaceutical and medical device companies - how come they are not interested?

For more information on marketing to Hispanics, take a look at the following:

• Language fact: Universal Spanish
• 6 reasons NOT to translate your web site
• Overcoming cultural barriers to global marketing

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

Here is an excellent but under-publicized resource: Esaurus.org maintains an English/Chinese medical dictionary.

The basic terminology list is not huge but that's actually a good thing. It's possible to refer to the site quickly, without wading through tons of similar terms. I also like the "annexes" for terminology related to drugs, medical specialties, medical facilities, and chemical elements.

The site is a bit hard to use - there are tons of Google ads and text cannot be copied-and-pasted. Nonetheless, because the content is good, Esaurus.org is a worthwhile addition to your tool kit.


ForeignExchange provides medical translations to medical device and biopharma companies - in Chinese and dozens of other languages. Ask us for a detailed proposal on your next medical translation project.
 
 

Medical device companies and medical translation providers alike are scrambling to meet the new requirements of the EU's updated Medical Device Directive (MDD, 2007/47/EC).

One of the most challenging components of the new directive is the increased focus on language translation for software and labeling. The updated MDD states that software which is integral to the operation of a medical device must be translated into the languages of the countries in which the device will be sold.

In the past, companies have been able to avoid translating software by stating that the great majority of professional device users can read English. Software translation is no small feat. It can be expensive, time-consuming and a minefield for errors. But it doesn't have to be this way. Through implementing some best practices and avoiding common pitfalls, software translations can go smoothly.

Notified bodies are now placing particular emphasis on the risks presented by inaccurate labeling and translations. Inaccuracies in labeling and IFUs can lead to incorrect use of a device, resulting in injury, death, notified body action, lawsuits and bad publicity. The root causes of inaccurate translations are many, but fortunately, these can be sidestepped through careful preparation, translator screening and efficient processes.

Do you know which languages are needed in which European countries? Some of the requirements may surprise you. We have pulled together a helpful chart of the EU countries and their language requirements.

In addition, take a look at three upcoming events dealing with the revised MDD:

• The 2010 MDD Revisions and What They Mean for Translation
• Medical Device Vigilance Planning under the Revised MDD
• Good Auditing Practices for EU Notified Body Audits

ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized software translation and localization services to medical device companies. Contact us to learn more.

There may be some big changes afoot for the European Union's Clinical Trials Directive (2001/20/EC).

Pretty much ever since it became law in 2004, various sponsors, industry groups, and advocacy groups have called for changes and improvements to the directive. The European Cancer Organization (ECCO) is one of the latest to call for changes to the directive.

ECCO supports an effort to streamline trials and has voiced this to the European Commission. Currently, there is a lack of harmonization among European countries with respect to conducting clinical trials. This has led to confusion, red tape,and delays in trials - and thus delays in getting therapies to patients.

Some of the changes proposed include clarifying the role of the sponsor, centralizing the Clinical Trial Authorisation, simplifying the process for amendments, and reducing bureaucracy. ECCO's press release has all of the details.


ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translations for clinical research - from patient recruitment to ICFs to diaries, ForeignExchange supports sponsors in 40+ languages. Contact us for more information.

Managing suppliers is key to successful operations - at translation companies as much as at medical device or pharmaceutical companies.

Getting access to high-quality services at a cost-effective price is the biggest benefit that organizations get from outsourcing. Especially in the current tough economic environment, companies outsource non-essential business functions to reduce cost structures and staff payroll.

But as companies continue to outsource more and more processes, the quality agreement becomes critical to supply chain operations. In the pharma business, quality agreements are required by the EU GMPs and are recommended per the International Conference on Harmonization's Q10, known as Pharmaceutical Quality System [PDF link].

In the translation business, EN 15038 provides guidance on quality management and also addresses topics such as human resources, linguist competency, technical resources, project management, and client relationships. In short, it covers all the important areas that will determine the level of service and quality you can expect from your translation provider.

But as companies outsource more and more parts of their operation, it is becoming clear to them that they cannot delegate quality to contractors or subcontractors - people can die.

To identify the key elements of what to include in the quality agreement so that if something goes wrong, responsibilities have been clearly delineated and corrective action can proceed smoothly, take a look at two of our audio conferences:

• EN 15038:2006 - A Tool for Assessing Translation Providers
• QA Oversight of Vendor Management

ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known software localization quality. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations.
 
 

Guest article:
By Ethan Shen, Founder of Gabble On LLC


Throughout my three years of high school Spanish and three years of college Chinese, I used automatic translation sites like Babelfish a lot. It's not because I'm a bad student, it's just that I was simultaneously interested in languages but also too lazy to expend the effort to study them properly.

I knew it was far from perfect, but I justified shamelessly turning it in because my own shitty Spanish probably wouldn't have done any better. I still remember cranking out pages of homework in a matter of minutes with a few clicks. Something for nothing, who could resist? Since those days many new engines have appeared and I assume if Moore's Law also applies to translation, it must have evolved a lot in the last 10 years.

However, one question that's never been answered is: "Which engine translates best?"

Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics. Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.

Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

In our first open research project, we will compare the three most popular free translation utilities:

1. Google Translate
2. Microsoft Bing Translator
3. Yahoo BabelFish

In order to answer this question we've built a dynamic comparison engine and set a goal of collecting 10,000 votes by March 29th. Once we have achieved our goal, we will analyze the data, and publish the results. (See our project hypothesis for more details)

We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take five minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.

In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.

Down the road, the Gabble On team envisions future research projects that also include non-free commercial translation engines which will be able to help people make more objective and well-informed decisions when selecting translation solutions. During the second quarter of 2010, we'd also like to use this research as a basis for free web and mobile tools that will help make these technologies more accessible and effective.

I appreciate your votes, and I hope you are as curious and excited about these questions as we are!


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Today, global drug and device companies are moving aggressively toward computer-based training. Driven by an increased need to rapidly provide consistent training across an international audience, this trend is accelerating in light of reduced travel and training budgets brought on by the current recession.

The challenge for many companies is how to prepare training materials that were created for a particular culture or country for their international team members. The first step in the process is called "internationalization."

Internationalization is the practice of creating content that is locale independent. Content that has not been internationalized can take twice as long and cost twice as much to localize as internationalized content.

The process of internationalization creates a core of content that is not biased towards any particular language or market.

The best time to internationalize is during development and before localization has started. The main benefits of this approach are:

• errors are found early in the process
• errors are more easily fixed by the people familiar with the content
• the internationalization effort costs less and takes less time
• the localization effort will cost less and take less time

Issues for internationalization
First and foremost, always allow room for the text to expand – not all ideas take up the same space in different languages.

Where possible, avoid placing text in graphics. Most localizable graphics consist of text on a structured background. To localize graphic text, the localizer must access the textual part of the graphic.

Localizable graphics should be in a package that supports "layering" so that the text portion of the graphic is on a separate layer and is easily accessible for localization.

If there is no alternative to embedding text in files:

• provide a well-documented, layered source file with details of the fonts and colors used, and
• leave room for text expansion – otherwise words may be truncated.

Symbols and other design elements
As part of the course design, avoid culture-dependent symbols that might not be clear to an international audience. A classic example would be an American mailbox with a little flag to indicate that there is new mail.

This symbol is often used to indicate email but people outside of North America will not necessarily recognize the mailbox. A better symbol would be an envelope, which is universally understood.

Symbols may have different meanings in different cultures. If there are any doubts regarding the hidden meaning of a symbol, use words instead.

As a general rule, the following should be avoided in any graphics used:

• shapes that are tied to culture, such as stop signs, sports equipment, mailboxes
• hand gestures or body parts
• religious or astrological symbols like stars or crosses
• graphics with multiple meanings, such as using a pillar to indicate a column

Sort order
Characters are not sorted the same way in all languages. In Swedish, for example, some extended characters (for example, å) are sorted after the letter z.

This is more the case in languages that do not use the Western alphabet. In many Asian cultures, characters are composed of brushstrokes; characters are sorted by the brush stroke order.

After localization, the first letter of the word might change, which will change its position in the sort order list.

It is necessary to either find a way to automatically sort the items, or to ensure that the translators can change the sort order of the list while they are localizing the code. It is difficult to sort automatically, and it is best to allow the translators to sort the list.

Items that change
The following list provides some of the items that must be changed during internationalization:

• calendar system: Gregorian (western), Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew
• date formats: dd/mm/yyyy versus mm/dd/yyyy
• time formats: a.m./p.m. versus. 24-hour clock
• currency formats and other financial data: taxes, shipping charges
• number formats: decimal separator, thousands separator
• font names and sizes

For easier localization of fonts, consider building pages using Cascading Style Sheets so that translators can change the fonts for all pages in one place.

Other issues for consideration include:

• address formats: postal codes, states, number of address lines required, etc.
• name formats: salutation, order of given name versus surname, titles, degrees
• telephone number formats: number of digits, country and area codes
• units of measure: Imperial versus Metric
• paper sizes: letter/legal versus A3/A4
• meaning of colors in different cultures
• order of first and last names

In this age of globalization and geographically disparate staff, many companies are looking to online, computer-based programs to provide their multilingual, multicultural personnel with the requisite training. With the proper forethought and internationalization, global training programs become a cost-effective tool for quickly and consistently training global teams.

International training is a vast topic. To delve deeper into it, take a look at the following resources:

• Developing Compliance Training in Highly Regulated Environments
• eLearning Tune-Up: Small Changes for Big Results
• Using Learning Styles to Successfully Engage All Learners
• International standards for date and time
• Authoring without borders
• Adapting eLearning to Chinese norms

ForeignExchange provides specialized medical translations for training courses developed by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Contact us to find out more!
 
 

The shortest month of the year is behind us. And what a month it was! Boston uncharacteristically avoided all of the big snow storms that hit the East Coast, and we published some a lot of really good articles on Medical Translation Insight.

These were the five most popular articles in February:

1. Helping clients reduce translation costs - Less dribble and more valuable, actionable information - we tell you how you can help your clients
2. 10 ways to scare off clients - Could this be you: "companies just don't care enough about their customers after the sale has been made"
3. EuroTermBank makes sense - The EU's EuroTermBank project looks poised to succeed where many others have failed
4. What does a Chinese keyboard look like? - Inquiring minds want to know!
5. Medical abbreviations - Check out ITI MedNet's database of medical abbreviations on the Watercooler's Medical Translators group

Looking for more great content? Take a look at our top articles for January, December, and November. Happy reading!

You know how sometimes you need to do something that spans cultures, languages, and geographies like wanting to book a flight from Spain to France using a German-language web site? These little things can be really hard to accomplish.

SLEDICT solves one type of issue like that. It is in the early stages of becoming a comprehensive German-English legal dictionary. While there is nothing too unusual about that, SLEDICT is unique and valuable because it's based on Swiss law.

It will be invaluable for linguists and attorneys looking to translate words like "Stammkapital" for a Swiss LLC or "provisorische Rechtsöffnung". Where possible, the site uses official translations from admin.ch, ch.ch, from federal offices like the Federal Office for Migration or cantonal offices like the Commercial Registry Office of the Canton of Zurich, and so on. Visitor can also suggest new entries and correct other users' translations.

Sascha Oliver Stocker maintains the small but fast-growing dictionary in two versions: as a blog that highlights newly added terms and in table format, suitable for sorting and searching.

Be sure to bookmark the site so that you can look up "Singularsukzession" when you need to!

[Thanks to Fabio Said for the lead!]


ForeignExchange supports clients' medical translation needs with comprehensive terminology management services and technology. Contact us to find out more!
 
 

Eleven months ago, we reported on our early experiences with blogging. At the time, we were brand new to this social media thing and just trying to understand what's what.

We still haven't mastered the subject but over the past year we have learned a good bit. To demonstrate that, it's interesting to take another look at how many visits originated from social networking sites, this time during the period of December 2009 to February 2010.

Overall, the percentage of visits that originated on other site ("referring sites" in Google Analytics parlance) has stayed constant at 33%. But the details have changed substantially the top three social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook). Our traffic that came from these three sites has grown grown by 81%.

Here is the breakdown of visits coming from each site over the past three months:


Some of this growth can be attributed to the maturing of social networking in general. And some of it was a direct result of our actions.

For instance, after noting last year that "We didn't use an actual Twitter account. The links that originated from Twitter came from other people posting about our blog", we signed up for our own Twitter account. We now tweet blog entries, audio conference notices, and other news at @fxtrans.

We have also increased our participation in LinkedIn groups; they account for 90+% of the LinkedIn referrals.

Interestingly, we have experimented with other sites but have been disappointed with the results. For instance, Plaxo has generated a grand total of 4 referrals from December to February.

What's next? The answer might be social news.

Even though we haven't "worked it", digg has started to show up regularly in our referral reports. It is still contributing small visitor numbers (52 from December to February) but they are growing quickly. We have also experimented with Stumbleupon, Delicious, and Reddit but the jury is still out on how effective these social news sites are.

I sometimes get asked whether all of this effort is really worth it. The answer is an unqualified "yes". Here is a sampling of the benefits that have accrued to us from having a blog and being active social networkers:

• overtures regarding acquisitions
• revenue increases (both translation services and audio conference attendance)
• dozens of article ideas for use on our blog and in our newsletters
• improved information flow to partners, suppliers, and, yes, even ForeignExchange team members
• reinforcement of ForeignExchange leadership position in medical translation

The good news is that anybody can do this, with similarly positive results. There is no "secret sauce".

It's no more complicated than "growth begets more growth": Provide valuable content and proactively look to grow your reader base. As long as you continue to publish worthwhile content, those readers will help you find more readers (links from other blogs, retweets, participation in forums and online discussions). For instance, over the first two months of 2010, our blog readers have increased by 15% and our Twitter followers by 30%, with minimal efforts on our part.

If you want to get started with social media or want to improve what you're doing, there are lots of good books, blogs, and web sites out there. As a starting point, though, take a look at Louis Gray's collection of 40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media.

Happy networking!


Blogging isn't all we do! ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translation and software localization services to pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Contact us to learn more.
 
 

British firm Kwintessential recently became the first translation company to launch an iPhone app. Its International Business Etiquette app features information for business travelers on topics like language use, culture, etiquette, and business protocol. The app is free and requires the iPhone OS 3.1.2.

Unfortunately, the app is not getting a warm reception from iPhone users. As of this writing, there are no reviews but early customer ratings are not encouraging.

This is too bad and kind of surprising because the company's web-based version is really useful. It covers a lot of countries, provides accurate information, and is easy to use.

Has anybody tried the iPhone version? Any impressions you can share?

For other iPhone applications related to health care and translation, take a look at the following posts:

• When cell phones become medical devices
  
• Translation moves to smartphones
• Science journal Nature jumps on iPhone bandwagon

ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known translation quality. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations.
 
 

Over the past 8+ years, ForeignExchange's dedicated audio conference team produced hundreds of events for thousands of attendees. This effort has become an important educational tool for ForeignExchange, our clients, and our suppliers.

Our team continually improves the usability of FxConferences.com, the web site for our audio conference program, and we are happy to announce that a major site redesign has just been successfully completed.

The new FxConferences.com features a substantially improved user interface. Event information is better laid out - from the results list to the event abstracts themselves. FxConferences.com now provides streamlined information in a central location.

Here are the main changes and improvements that we made (for comparison, take a look at our old audio conference site) :

1. The search functionality is much deeper, creating advanced search capabilities and better industry and department-specific yields.
2. The results of your searches are highly sortable, enabling users to list titles by date, name, department, or industry.
3. The new site is aesthetically more pleasing - it looks really great!
4. Users have much better access to other audio conferences by the same speaker or company.

Take a look at the new FxConferences.com and join us for an event!


ForeignExchange produces almost-daily audio conferences around regulatory, clinical, quality, financial, and medical translation topics. Visit us at FxConferences.com to learn more.