A paradigm shift in the medical translation industry and the responses from clients…

In our sales efforts at MotaWord when we reach out to a potential client, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry, we frequently hear similar comments and they all revolve around a few questions and concerns. After all, translating medical records, marketing brochures, consent forms and such is not new - some hospitals inform us that they have been working with the same translation agency for decades not years or months. When you offer something new, that causes disruption in the industry through technology, it is only reasonable to assume that some people will always be concerned. Here, we attempt to collect most frequently talked about concerns and our responses to them from the MotaWord team.

We are all set!

• Most widely discussed topic 1 - we call them “We are all set” responses. We hear this all the time: we are all set since we...

  • have in-house interpreters who will translate our medical documents when they have time
  • have a contract through our system for x years and we are not looking to make any changes to our translation services at this time.
  • are currently pleased with the processes that we have in place for document translation, working with internal translators and a large agency when we need to farm things out
  • already have a translation process in place
  • are good

This raises our eyebrows involuntarily, as we know that the following happens without an exception:

Our existing clients reduce the cost of translations, speed up not only the translation delivery times, but also getting a simple instant quotation, as well as making sure that you are getting the highest translation quality possible. Yes, it is all possible with our Artificial Intelligence (AI) supported human translation platform as we cut out the most inefficient and expensive processes out of the whole picture and automated with the cutting edge technologies, which in turn provide the fastest, highest quality results without breaking the bank.

Understanding the role of Technology and Human in Translation business...

• Most widely discussed topic 2 - We call them the “medical translation expertise and technology” responses. We hear this time and time again. The concern probably stems from extensive use of cutting edge technologies like AI, Machine Learning (ML) etc. Once we speak about these technologies, sometimes people easily assume that we translate their work with Machine Translation (MT). After giving the reader a couple of examples below we will provide our responses to these questions..

  • If you are an AI and ML supported platform, then you must be using MT
  • We don’t think MT should be used in medical translation
  • Since you have almost 19,000 translators, we worry that people who do not necessarily have medical expertise may be translating our documents.
  • If you use AI for managing our projects, how can we be certain that the most qualified translators will be assigned to our projects?
  • I need to contact a real person not a machine

While we think that all of the concerns listed above are valid and will probably take a page or two to explain our platform in detail, we will for now just scratch the surface and provide a general answer. First of all, we do not utilize machine translation, period! All of the translation work coming to our platform is translated by multiple, flesh-and-bone, strictly vetted translators and proofreaders. Also, utilizing technologies such as AI and ML do not necessitate the need to use MT at all. We use these technologies to be more efficient so we can share the efficiency gain with our clients. Yes, we do have a large number of translators and proofreaders and it would be nearly impossible to manage them with human project managers (or one would need an army of project managers). For that we utilize these technologies so by the time you upload your document, our AI supported (Project Advanced Manager - Pam) will run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan and count the words in your document, provide you with an instant quotation, invite all medically trained/certified translators and proofreaders to work collaboratively on your document, and check the health and the quality of your translation orders. Pam, does more than that of course, however, we have many Community Managers who work with Pam to ensure the highest quality translations possible.