ATA SLD

Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)

American Translators Association: The Voice of Interpreters and Translators

Last call to register for the SLD virtual workshop “Interpreting Idioms and Cultural References”

ATA’s first-ever virtual workshop is on Saturday, March 13, and it’s organized in close collaboration with the Slavic Languages Division for the benefit of Russian interpreters.

“Interpreting Idioms and Cultural References” will be presented by Yuliya Speroff, medical interpreter supervisor at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, as well as a Russian-English CoreCHI™- and WA DSHS-certified medical and social services interpreter. Yuliya has interpreted in a variety of settings—from a fighter jet factory to real-time brain surgery. She has an MA in business management and is certified as both an English and a Russian language instructor with more than 10 years of teaching experience.

Yuliya Speroff was just named Interpreter of the Year by CHIA (California Healthcare Interpreting Association), so we are very excited to have her as our workshop instructor.

Join us this Saturday, March 13 at 12:00 pm Eastern time for two fun-filled hours of exploring various idioms and cultural references in English and Russian and small-group discussion of how to best convey their meaning in the target language. You don’t have to be an interpreter to join! In fact, translators who are interested in idioms will get a lot out of this workshop too, and will benefit from cross-pollination of ideas and experiences with colleagues working in other fields.

Due to the interactive nature of this workshop, attendance will be limited to 30 people.

Registration closes at 5 pm Eastern on Friday, March 12, so don’t delay—register today!

Participants are eligible for 2 ATA continuing education points, 2 CCHI continuing education units, and 0.15 IMIA/NBCMI continuing education units.

 

 

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: 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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