Health science & pharma
Clinical protocols, informed consent forms and regulatory dossiers translated by life-science specialists, with independent review on every file.
Where a translation error is a protocol deviation
Pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, clinical research organizations and device manufacturers translate under a different standard than everyone else. A clinical protocol that reads differently in Portuguese than in English produces sites running different studies. An informed consent form a patient misunderstands is an ethics problem before it is a language problem. A mistranslated line in a batch record is a GMP deviation — a breach of the manufacturing rules regulators audit against.
This is why health-science translation is a review discipline as much as a translation discipline.
What health-science teams translate with us
- Clinical trial documentation — protocols, investigator brochures, CRA training materials
- Patient-facing instruments — informed consent forms, questionnaires, patient-reported outcomes, quality-of-life measures
- Regulatory documentation — registration dossiers, NDA and IND files, audit responses
- Pharmacovigilance content — adverse event and SAE reports
- Manufacturing documents — SOPs, master batch records, deviation reports
- Labels, IFUs and patient information
Why generic and AI translation fail here
Medical language punishes approximation. “Adverse event” and “adverse reaction” are legally distinct. Dosage phrasing, units and decimal conventions differ by country — a comma-for-period slip changes a dose by a factor of ten. Machine translation engines produce fluent output with exactly these kinds of silent errors, and a reviewer without a life-science background reads right past them.
Patient-facing text adds a second trap: it must be accurate and written at a reading level an anxious layperson understands. That is a writing skill, not a dictionary lookup.
How our health-science practice group works
Link Translation has operated a health-science practice group since 2005. We screen and match linguists to your content — pharmacology for pharmacovigilance, biochemistry for manufacturing, clinical experience for protocols — and they translate only into their native language.
The QA stack is deeper than in any other industry we serve: proofreading by an independent second translator, terminology approval by a subject-matter expert, project-manager checks, and back translation where the risk profile calls for it. Certificates of accuracy come with every delivery, and physician validation in the target country is available when authorities require it.
Terminology is controlled in a term base shared across your protocols, labels and patient materials, and translation memory keeps amendments affordable: a protocol amendment is quoted on what changed. Fixed quote within 24 hours, in 30+ languages.
Services that fit this industry
Health-science teams typically combine clinical evaluation translation, medical labeling translation and QMS documentation translation, with terminology management underneath. Machine translation appears only where risk allows — never in patient-facing or submission-bound content.
Frequently asked questions
What health-science documents do you translate?
Clinical protocols, informed consent forms, case report forms, patient-reported outcomes, investigator brochures, pharmaceutical registration dossiers, SOPs, master batch records, product labels and patient information — across pharma, biotech, devices and CROs.
Do you provide back translation?
Yes. For high-risk documents such as informed consent forms and patient-facing instruments, we can translate the target text back into the source language by an independent linguist, so you can verify nothing shifted in meaning. Regulators and ethics committees often expect this.
Who translates clinical content?
Native-language linguists with training in medicine, pharmacology, biochemistry, biotechnology or toxicology, selected to match your content type. Every file receives proofreading by an independent second translator plus terminology approval.
Can you provide certificates of accuracy?
Yes, with every translation. Where regulatory authorities require it, we can also arrange validation of translated medical documents by physicians licensed in the target countries.