The Ongoing Need for Healthcare Translation Services

writing nurse

Now that the world’s healthcare officials are forecasting Covid’s shift to an eventual endemic, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Soon, the global pandemic that has impacted so many lives will be over, and the world will slowly return to normal.

While the worst of the pandemic may be behind us, Covid still places incredible pressure on healthcare professionals, including those providing healthcare translation services. 

The world’s certified medical translation services play an important role in the ongoing fight against Covid, as they share vital research, clinical trials, and drug patents. 

What is an Endemic?

Before defining an endemic, it helps if you understand what a pandemic is. A pandemic occurs when a disease spreads rapidly across the entire world. That’s what happened when Covid spread like wildfire across every continent in 2020. 

An endemic is a demotion. While it still involves a disease spreading through a population, it represents a lower and more stable infection rate. These conditions can only happen when enough people are vaccinated and herd immunity takes effect.

How Did Healthcare Translation Services Help?

The transition from pandemic to endemic relies heavily on the success of vaccines. 

The swift rollout of this life-saving vaccine technology relied on how easily the world’s scientists could access medical data and carry out clinical trials. 

While many scientists shared their results in English, just as many did not. 

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Taking notes – Photo by: English106 – Source: Flickr Creative Commons

Certified medical translators helped these scientists understand one another, even if they didn’t share the same language. With no common global language, the need for certified medical translators has never been greater.

Their healthcare translation services transpose critical raw data, studies, and other medical documents into multiple languages so that international teams can access vital information. 

Certified medical translators are also heavily involved at the patenting stages of the vaccines. They translate clinical trials and other important records required to file drug patents and approvals in different healthcare jurisdictions. 

How Are Healthcare Translation Services Still Involved?

Although several vaccines are now available on an international scale, the situation is constantly evolving. The healthcare community has to adapt to new challenges and emerging variants, and healthcare translators play a central role in their success.

In January 2022, scientists in Texas have developed a vaccine called CORBEVAX that addresses the lower vaccination rates in developing countries. CORBEVAX technology is cheaper and easier to produce for low-income nations.  

The Texas team has made their published data available for anyone hoping to replicate their technology, which sidesteps any complications from licensing. However, international teams may still need certified medical translators to understand this data for their own use.  

In late 2020, the first oral treatment of Covid emerged. Merck, the American pharmaceutical company behind this trailblazing drug, has now let other drug manufacturers make its antiviral tablet. 

Certified medical translators will play a crucial part in making Merck’s research, trials, and other documentation comprehensible to scientists who don’t speak English. They’ll create flawlessly accurate translations of this important information for international use. 

The Takeaway

Although the nature of the pandemic has changed, Covid is still very much an international problem. As long as the world’s top scientists and medical minds try to solve it, certified medical translators will support their work by ensuring their documentation is available in every language.