ATA SLD

Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)

American Translators Association: The Voice of Interpreters and Translators

CEU Watch: Clinical Trials and Medical Documentation: Resources and Translation Strategies for New Translators by Carmen Cross

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has brought upheaval and uncertainty to our profession, it has also been an opportunity to catch up on continuing education. However, I will not be reviewing any recent webinars on weathering the crisis or pivoting to remote interpreting. Today, I’d like to turn to an unexpectedly topical video from the ProZ.com video library—a repository that features webinars previously broadcast on the website. Disclaimer: Other than being a paying member, I have no business relationship with ProZ.com.

The video I watched was Clinical Trials and Medical Documentation: Resources and Translation Strategies for New Translators presented by German- and Arabic-to-English medical translator Carmen Cross. The live session took place back in 2016, but I found the presentation relevant to anyone getting started in the field of clinical trials.

Trial Background, Standards, and Terminology

In the first section of the webinar, the instructor gave an overview of the types of documentation produced in a clinical trial. Documents that may need translation include informed consent forms, patient information sheets, and serious adverse event reports. In addition, the speaker shared what areas clinical trials focus on. Even though our first thought may be drugs, Ms. Cross pointed out that other things may also be studied, such as medical devices or diagnostic procedures. She then went over some commonly studies drugs and drug targets (molecular entities the drug binds to). Next, the webinar focused on some common types of studies, including diagnostic, epidemiological, pharmacokinetic, and pharmacodynamic, among others. Finally, we looked at the phases of a trial, examining the objectives, number of participants, and length of each phase.

The following part concerned international standards that govern clinical trials, such as the International Conference on Harmonisation’s Good Clinical Practice (ICH GCP) addendum or the World Medical Association’s (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki. Ms. Cross named a few regulatory authorities overseeing clinical trials, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK, or the Public Health Institute in Russia, and emphasized that study sponsors apply to these bodies for approval. The documents involved in the application process, for example an investigational new drug application (IND), may require translation. The presenter pointed out that the actual research gets outsourced to the contract research organizations (CROs), who are responsible for trial data, and they may be the entity that needs translation services.

Finally, the speaker drew our attention to some tricky terms in this field and shared several resources we might want to turn to in our research. To name a few, she discussed the difference between efficacy and effectiveness; clinical trial and clinical study; and subject and patient. Ms. Cross recommended PubMed, which allows you to search in a particular language, and ClinicalTrials.gov, which lets you search for the full official title of the study by its ID.

Takeaways

I appreciated that the speaker not only provided an overview of clinical trials but also pointed out what organizations may be looking for translations, what documents may require translation, and where to look for terminology. She also listed the top countries where clinical trials are conducted—Russia, Turkey, China, Brazil, India, South Korea, and Mexico. Her advice was actionable and tailored to translators.

An obvious drawback of this webinar is that it was recorded in 2016, so some of the standards and processes might have changed since. In fact, the speaker mentioned that a new clinical trial regulation (EU No 536/2014) had been adopted, supplanting an earlier European Union directive, but its implementation was going to be gradual. I would still recommend this webinar to anyone interested in clinical trials, with the caveat that the viewer will need to do their own research to find up-to-date information.

Author Bio

Maria Guzenko is an ATA-certified English<>Russian translator and a certified medical interpreter (CMI-Russian). She holds an MA in translation from Kent State University and specializes in healthcare translation. Maria is a co-founder of the SLD exam practice group and the host of the SLD podcast, now rebranded as Slovo. More information can be found on her website at https://intorussian.net.

CEU Watch: International Keyword Research for Translators from Meridian Linguistics

Taught by Sara Maria Hasbun

Reviewed by Anna Livermore

I love CPD. My inner nerd rejoices at the prospect of starting a new course or attending a professional event. Nowadays, there are infinite opportunities to learn. So much so that it can be hard to choose from a gazillion options that come in the shape of online courses, professional conferences, live webinars, mentoring sessions, books, podcasts, blogs…

The CPD I dedicate time to usually falls into four categories: acquiring a new skill relevant to my specialization, improving my technical knowledge (CAT or DTP tools), keeping up with trends in the industry I specialize in or learning better business practices. Even so, the choice of available CPD options can be overwhelming. What helps me stay focused is going back to my marketing plan and my business goals, then choosing CPD opportunities that can help me achieve them.

One of the courses I completed recently is International Keyword Research for Translators from Meridian Linguistics. It is a short online course that provides a step by step guide for translators on working with international keywords. I intentionally use ‘working with’ instead of ‘translating’ because translation is only a small part of the overall process.

What this course is:

Exactly what it says on the tin: a guide outlining every step of creating a keyword file for a client in your target language for the target market. You will find out what needs to be discussed before you start work, what tools are available (and useful) for different stages of the project, what those stages are, why simply translating keywords from the source language does not cut it, and what your final product should look like.

Despite being short, the course packs a lot of information. The best thing about it is the way it relates the best practices for keyword research to the language industry and to the linguist’s role in that process.

What this course is not:

This is not a course that will help you optimize your own webpage, although some aspects of it can be useful. On the whole, its focus is researching keywords for clients for target regions.

It will answer a lot of questions about keywords—types of keywords, where to find them, how to choose them, and how they relate to an overall SEO strategy—but it is not a replacement for general SEO courses.

Bottom line:

I highly recommend this course: the information in it is distilled to help improve the specific skill of working with international keywords. It is designed and delivered by people who over the years have developed professional expertise in the field. I have been working with SEO and multilingual keyword research for several years now and still took away a lot from this course, which will help me deliver even more value to my clients.

Anna Livermore is an English>Russian and German>Russian translator and former marketing specialist. With a linguistics degree from the Oxford Brookes University and a Professional Diploma in marketing, she came to specialize in translating marketing materials, corporate communications, website content and various components of SEM. She is a member of the Slavic Languages Division’s Social Media team. Contact: livermore.translations@gmail.com

CEU Watch: DVTA 2019 East Coast Summit

Photo credit: DVTA

On September 14 I gave up my Saturday to network and learn at a one-day conference organized by my local ATA chapter, the Delaware Valley Translators Association (DVTA). The event, formally the 4th Annual East Coast Interpreters and Translators Summit, was hosted at Widener University Delaware Law School, which is a convenient 25-minute drive for me. This was a lovely, local, bite-size chunk of professional development that left me energized, inspired, and excited to keep working on my skills and my business.

For the two two-hour slots where there were several talks to choose from, I chose the translation-related sessions. Reflecting the DVTA’s membership, most of the sessions focused on interpreting, so there was one translation session for each slot. The first session, led by DVTA President Dorothy Evans, was titled “What Does It Mean to Be a Successful Translator?” and was the most inspiring session for me. While the context and the examples all referred back to our shared experience as freelance translators, the themes of determining your own definition of success, setting reasonable goals, and making incremental changes apply broadly to self-employment and life in general. Plus, it was encouraging to hear a more established translator talk with candor and humor about the same struggles I’ve been running into.

The second session was one on diplomatic translation by Joe Mazza, the head of the translation division at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Language Services. His presence speaks to the fact that attendees at the summit hailed from up and down the Northeast Corridor, offering more networking opportunities than other DVTA events. While I’ve seen Joe speak at other events and chatted with him multiple times at ATA conferences, this time around he had a longer session (two hours instead of his usual one) and there were contractors that work with his office in the audience, in a relatively informal setting where they were able to share their experiences to complement his presentation. This time something clicked—maybe the fact that I finally have the five years’ experience Joe had stipulated the very first time I talked to him—and, with the encouragement of one of the contractors, I got the ball rolling on applying to work for the State Department.

Two other sessions were held for all attendees at once: the keynote and a closing session by a local accountant. The keynote speaker, Holly Mikkelson, gave a somewhat lyrical meditation on considering the human side of interpreting, keeping in mind the ways in which real lives are affected, and remaining compassionate rather than clinical. (Of course, much the same can be said of translation, even if we don’t see the humans affected face to face.) The closing session was a demo of QuickBooks that unfortunately ran into some technical difficulties (when each keypress registers twice, $120 very quickly becomes $112,200), but still sparked useful conversations and convinced me to take the plunge after doing my accounting by hand and Excel for over three years.

All in all, this summit had the energizing effect of an ATA conference on a smaller scale. I came away with workable steps to take moving forward, not to mention 5 CEUs. I would encourage everyone to check if they have an ATA chapter nearby and see if they organize a local conference or summit. It’s well worth a Saturday!

Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya is a Russian>English (ATA-certified) and French>English legal and financial translator based in the Philadelphia area. She holds a Master’s in Translation from Kent State University.

CEU Watch: ATA Webinar on Linguistic Challenges in Palliative Care

Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash

Are there topics that you enjoy working with but can be emotionally draining? For me, palliative care is one example. I love working on translations that can help promote understanding of palliative care among Russian patients and the general public, as well as the development of palliative care in Russia, but it can be hard to look past the suffering and pain behind the text, especially if it is about pediatric palliative care.

I was glad to discover that ATA offers a webinar on this subject. “Linguistic Challenges in Palliative Care” by Jessica Goldhirsch can be found in ATA’s Webinars On Demand. Jessica Goldhirsch, LCSW, MSW, MPH is a licensed clinical social worker with the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Institute’s inpatient adult palliative care consult service. She teaches staff interpreters and clinical staff how to work together effectively, and her background and experience really show.

Ms. Goldhirsch talks about the role of palliative care in the healthcare system and different stages of palliative care (hospice care is just one of them). She breaks down commonly used terminology, lists the most common misconceptions, and describes typical challenges. She stresses that the interpreter/translator must be an integral part of the palliative care team, backs it up with examples, and gives advice on how to become a member of this team. Most importantly, Ms. Goldhirsch explains how crucial it is to understand the patient’s cultural norms, beliefs, and traditions, and encourages interpreters and translators to be cultural meditators and coaches for the palliative care team.

I found this webinar both highly informative and really empowering. It didn’t make palliative care less of a difficult subject, but it helped me understand its scope and purpose, and made it clear what my role is. Armed with tips and useful resources that Ms. Goldhirsch generously shared, I feel better prepared, both mentally and emotionally, to tackle future translations on this subject.

I am grateful that ATA offered this webinar and included it in its Webinars On Demand. Ms. Goldhirsch mentioned other topics that she believes deserve to be addressed in more detail, such as serious illness conversation guides and palliative care family meetings, and I hope that ATA will offer webinars on these topics in the future.

Author Bio

Veronika Demichelis is an ATA-certified English>Russian translator. She holds an MA in Linguistics and an MBA in Human Resources Management. She specializes in corporate communication, HR, and social responsibility, but also enjoys working with health and wellness, in particular patient outreach and education materials. More information can be found on her website, https://veronikademichelis.com/.

CEU Watch: Medical Translation Course (English–Russian) by Alliance Pro

By Maria Guzenko

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

Introducing the CEU Watch Column

Having up-to-date subject-matter, technology, and business expertise is one of the things that sets the professional translator apart from the amateur. In addition, if you are certified by the American Translators Association (ATA) or another translation/interpreting organization, you need to accrue continuing education credits to maintain your credential. The requirements will vary depending on the organization, and those for the ATA can be found here.

With that in mind, I would like to start a column where we review continuing education opportunities, whether specific to the languages of the SLD, focused on a certain subject area or text type, or promoting any other skill useful for translators. If you have taken a course, watched a webinar, or attended an event in the last year or so and would like to review it for the SLD blog, please get in touch with Maria Guzenko at maria.guzenko@intorussian.net.

Course Information

My American Master’s degree, while incredibly helpful in many ways, did not offer practical English-to-Russian classes. Since I mostly translate into Russian, I wanted to fill that gap and started looking for language-specific classes where I could get some tips, guided practice, and feedback. My search brought me to the website of Alliance Pro («Альянс Про»), a company that offers Russian translation and interpreting classes, either as live webinars or as recordings of past events. I have no financial or business relationship with this course provider, other than paying for their class.

The class I took was called Medical Translation («Медицинский перевод») and “met” via teleconference twice a week for two hours. Four weeks of webinars were followed by a final test, which determined whether the participant would get a certificate of completion. Because the live sessions were held in the evening, Moscow time, I was able to join in the early afternoon on the East Coast. Webinar recordings and PowerPoints were available for later viewing if you had to miss the live session, which was also convenient for the times I had to be away from my desk.

Content and Instructor

The course was taught by Olga Gilyarevskaya (Ольга Гиляревская), the chief editor of a Moscow-based translation agency and a former pharmaceutical representative. It appeared that the curriculum largely reflected the types of documents and subjects Ms. Gilyarevskaya regularly saw in her work, such as clinical study protocols and disease descriptions. Each week covered a different area; by the end of the course, we had looked at clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, oncology, cardiology, pharmaceutical companies, and ophthalmology.

Each webinar started with the instructor going over the homework from the previous class, and she would either comment on our cohort’s proposed solutions or discuss typical errors for the homework passage. Next, the instructor would present new material. Beware, a typical PowerPoint had more than 100 slides, which can definitely be a lot of information, especially if you are trying to take notes! Fortunately, the PowerPoints were available to the course participants online so you could always go over them later.

On the positive side, Ms. Gilyarevskaya did not only lecture and share information; she made sure to keep the group engaged by asking us for possible translations and giving us feedback. Clinical studies can be intimidating for a newcomer, and the teacher put the group at ease with her down-to-earth attitude and not being hard on those giving incorrect answers.

Workload and Homework

At the end of each class, the instructor would assign homework for the following class. There were two differently priced “access tiers” for this course, so some participants turned in homework and had it corrected, while others simply audited the class. We would normally get a choice of two texts, one more advanced than the other. A typical passage would be some 3-4 paragraphs long, and we would usually get about 2 days to upload our translation. Between going over the new material and doing your homework, you would probably need a minimum of two hours after each session, so I do not recommend taking this class if you are overloaded with work or family responsibilities!

A lot of homework passages came from clinical trial documentation, and I appreciated that we worked on real-life texts. On the other hand, the homework would regularly include concepts we had not discussed in the previous lecture. It could be a bit discouraging when some things in the passage were not clear even after you went over your class notes. I suppose that reflects real-world working conditions, where we often have to research things as we go along.

Takeaways

Any review is bound to be subjective, so what I say here reflects my professional goals and preferences. If you come to this class expecting a comprehensive overview of medicine and different text types in various specialties, you are likely to be disappointed. For instance, the text types I translate most often—patient education materials and descriptions of health benefits—were not represented. Neither were such areas as mental health or diagnostic imaging. That makes perfect sense, though—no single month-long class can cover all possible text types you come across in the medical field.

Personally, I am happy I took this class. I now have a better understanding of clinical trials, statistics, immune therapy, and the cellular mechanisms underlying cancer, even though I still have a lot more to learn. I also enjoyed the easygoing teacher and the “can-do” attitude she encouraged in her students. I would recommend this class to English-Russian translators who are interested in clinical studies and are willing to put in several hours of study and homework every week.

Author Bio

Maria Guzenko is an ATA-certified English<>Russian translator and a certified medical interpreter (CMI-Russian). She holds an MA in translation from Kent State University and specializes in healthcare and marketing content. Maria has also worked as a project manager and has taught college Russian and writing classes. More information can be found on Maria’s website at https://intorussian.net.

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