MTPE for regulated industries
Machine translation can have a place in regulated content — if the post-editing behind it is disciplined, documented and done by specialists. This is that version of MTPE.
The problem with ordinary MTPE in regulated content
Standard machine translation post-editing is built for speed and volume. Regulated content — medical device documentation, machinery manuals under CE marking, quality records, legal instruments — adds two demands that ordinary MTPE does not meet: terminology that must match approved standards exactly, and the ability to prove, later, how the translation was produced and who verified it.
MTPE for regulated industries is our post-editing service rebuilt around those two demands. The economics of machine translation, with the discipline of a regulated translation process.
What makes it different
- Specialist post-editors, not generalists — editors come from our sector practice groups: life-science backgrounds for medical content, engineering for machinery, legal linguists for contracts. Full post-editing to publication quality, always.
- Terminology enforcement — editing runs against your term base and the relevant standard vocabularies, with automated QA that flags any deviation from an approved term before delivery.
- Independent second review — every file is checked by a second specialist, the same rule we apply to human translation. A post-edited file does not get a lighter review because a machine wrote the draft.
- A documented process — engine, editor, reviewer, term base version and QA checks are recorded per document. When your quality system or an auditor asks how a translation was produced, the answer is on file.
- Content triage — before any project starts, we classify your content: what is suitable for MTPE, and what must be human-translated from the start. Safety-critical text is always in the second group.
Why triage is the honest part of the service
The biggest MTPE mistake in regulated industries is not bad editing — it is putting the wrong content through the pipeline in the first place. A dropped negation in an internal SOP is an annoyance; the same error in a contraindication is a patient-safety issue. So the service starts with a map, not a price per word: your documentation, sorted by risk, with an explicit line showing what goes through MTPE and what does not. You approve the line before anything runs.
That triage is also where the savings become real. Most regulated companies sit on large volumes of lower-risk content — procedures, records, reference material — that is expensive to translate conventionally and safe to post-edit properly. Moving that layer to disciplined MTPE funds doing the critical layer right.
Getting started
Send a representative sample of your documentation set. You get a fixed quote within 24 hours, including the proposed triage — which content we recommend for MTPE, which for human translation, and what the documented process will look like for each. Available in 30+ languages, backed by the practice groups we have run since 2005.
Frequently asked questions
Is MTPE even allowed for regulated content?
Usually the regulation cares about the outcome — an accurate translation and a controlled process — not about which tools were used. What matters is that a qualified human verified every sentence and that you can show how. We help you draw the line: which of your content types can go through MTPE, and which must be human-translated from the start.
What does the audit trail include?
A defined, repeatable process: which engine produced the draft, which qualified post-editor corrected it, which reviewer independently checked it, and which term base and QA checks were applied. If an auditor or notified body asks how a document was translated, you have a documented answer.
Who does the post-editing?
Specialists from the relevant sector practice group — life-science backgrounds for medical content, engineering backgrounds for machinery, legal linguists for contracts — editing into their native language. Full post-editing only; light post-editing has no place in regulated content.
Which content should never go through MTPE?
Safety warnings, contraindications, dosage instructions and similar high-risk text, where we translate with humans from the start. The realistic MTPE candidates are the high-volume, lower-risk layers around them: SOPs, internal quality records, technical reference material. We map this with you before anything runs through an engine.