We’ve all had a good laugh at botched translations on signs, menus or product labels when travelling abroad. But in the realm of specialist medical and technical translation, these mistakes are rarely a laughing matter. 

Just for a moment imagine the chaos caused by mistranslating “steam” as “smoke” in a technical manual.

The now infamous example of the English phrase “hydraulic rams” being hilariously back-translated as “wet sheep” in an instruction manual for an engineering company perfectly illustrates how things can get lost in translation… 

It’s an issue that’s been with us since we first needed to pass on information and instructions from one country to another. One of the most famous cases being when Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877. He ended up inadvertently sparking an entire wave of science fiction by mistranslating the Italian word ‘canali’ as ‘canals’ rather than ‘channels,’ fueling wild beliefs about potential artificial waterways on the red planet.  

The Dangers of Medical Mistranslation  

While anecdotes like these certainly provide some humour, they also highlight the critical importance of accurate translation for medical and technical documentation. The potential consequences of mistranslation in healthcare contexts, for example, is no laughing matter… 

A case in point was a translation error that caused a serious issue with knee replacement surgeries in Germany in 2007. The labelling on packages for a knee prosthetic that read “non-modular cemented” was inaccurately translated as simply “non-cemented.” 

Unfortunately this incorrect guidance caused surgeons to perform 47 knee replacements without using any cement to affix the prosthetic – resulting in all of those patients having to endure additional painful revision surgeries just months later.

In the pharmaceutical realm, translation mistakes can have even more dire repercussions. Beyond mistranslations causing issues such as new drugs being barred from markets and costing companies millions or even billions in potential revenue, they can cause a very real threat to patient safety. 

How to Prevent Medical and Technical Mistranslations

So how can these costly and potentially life-threatening mistranslations be prevented?

The first step is recognising that machine translation, despite its recent advancements, is nowhere near reliable enough to use without human oversight – especially for complex medical, scientific or technical content. 

While some examples of Google Translate’s failures provide comic relief (such as the French idiom “Se faire la belle”, meaning “to run away” being incorrectly rendered as “to make beautiful”), an AI’s mistakes in a medical setting could easily turn tragic.

The key is to use machine translation as an aid, not a substitute for expert human linguists with deep subject matter expertise.

When it comes to medical translation, this means working with specialist healthcare language service providers who employ highly experienced translators with extensive knowledge of healthcare terminology, protocols, cultural contexts and more. Having this level of human quality assurance to review and refine machine outputs is essential.

Other best practices include leveraging translation memory and terminology management tools to ensure consistency, allowing reasonable timelines and budgets for translation of complex technical documentation, and rigorously testing translations before deploying to the real world.  

With reasonable precautions and partnership with the right specialist medical and technical language experts, we can avoid both reputation damaging and potential dangerous mistranslations  – and be sure critical information makes it accurately to its intended audience, regardless of language.

If you would like to find out more about how our language experts can help you with accurate, culturally nuanced medical or technical translation, get in contact anytime.