Medical Translations

Medical Translations

Published in Medical translations on 16/03/2021

For translators and interpreters, medical translations are an important field of work. This is why we regularly receive requests for translations of all kinds of medical texts, including descriptions of medical equipment in English as well as medical reports in Dutch and articles in French published in journals.

Medical Translations - Terminology

Medicine is certainly one of the most complex fields that translators and interpreters can specialize in. It’s not without reason that doctors study for years or sometimes even decades to be able to provide the best possible treatment for their patients. One of the difficulties of medical translations, apart from the content being extremely complex, is the medical vocabulary - even if you don’t take into account the terminology for the parts of the body including bones, muscles and joints, the seemingly endless number of medical devices and procedures amounts to an almost infinite number of technical words.

Apart from doctors, nurses, medical engineers and other medical staff, also translators and interpreters who work on medical texts or interpret at medical congresses need to know this terminology - in more than only one language. It is of course clear that the professional expertise of translators and interpreters is nowhere near that of trained doctors & nurses. Therefore, it is even more important to be precise and to do extensive terminological research in order to avoid mistakes from creeping into a translation.

Medical Translations - Latin to the rescue

Linguistically speaking, medicine has one decisive advantage over other specialist fields: In many languages, especially Indo-European languages in Europe, words deriving from Latin or Greek are still used in everyday language to describe bones or parts of the body. This makes it easier to translate from one language into another - at least between two languages where it is common to use either the Latin or the Greek terms. Unfortunately, German is not one of those languages. Although Latin and Greek terms are also used in German (in technical language), the word “Femur” for example, is more commonly referred to as “Oberschenkelknochen” in German-speaking countries. This is not the case in English or French, where “femur” or “fémur” are used in everyday speech and are sometimes even preferred to less technical terms like “thigh bone”.

Medical Translations - English, French & many other languages

Translators and interpreters working for Translation Agency Vienna | Connect Translations Austria GmbH are not only aware of these difficulties but have also developed strategies over the years how to deal with the complex medical terminology. This is why you can safely turn to us if you have a medical text either in English, French, Dutch or any one of the other 20 languages for which we offer medical translations. You can also come to us if you are organizing a medical congress and are looking for a qualified interpreter. We would be very pleased to help you.