Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Eternal karma of the translation industry?


Working daily to major medical, insurance companies and legal presents all kinds of different challenges, ranging from a wide variety of pairs of rare languages that require immediate, to having to deal with hieroglyphs translation almost illegible manuscripts which many customers send us to translate, expecting the same quality at the same price. And Yes, sometimes it's terrible.
First, we will describe the challenges of translatable content written by hand. You should know the different trades to show different peculiarities when it comes to translate content. The doctors are just one of them. Many times, does not make much sense is the result of a bad grammar (for example, use scarce signs of punctuation, the incorrect sentence structure, gender or number disagreement, etc.).

Another challenge in health insurance claims comes from local brands of prescription drugs. This, along with poor penmanship, difficult to translators when they seek local brand names. Sometimes weep asking for more context that will help you to understand what medication you may be prescribed. Full file with printed reports of the clinical records of the claimant can certainly help.
Scribble with a bad letter is not the only danger. These documents usually are scanned at low resolution copies or, even worse are now sent as a snapshot that is forwarded directly from a Smartphone. The low resolution added more problems to a complicated picture.
Let me add one more obstacle: bilingual content! This may sound local to the us, but believe me it happens! Many of clinical logs we receive every day come from patients (including tourists) who come from Puerto Rico or any Caribbean island where the population tends to be bilingual. Physicians are also bilingual and, often, are used to read papers in English, so that they are accustomed to the terminology or the acronyms used in English. However, the printed template is in Spanish, what leads you to believe that the content written by hand is also in that language. You are surprised to know that the content written by hand is completed in English; and, what is worse, that health professionals sometimes jump from English to the Spanish and vice versa.
The point is that having to deal with poorly handwritten documents is expensive and slow.
To begin with, it's not even text that we can convert to editable by any digital medium immediately. And as in the first place is very hard to read, resources working in the translation will have to charge additional hours only for the process of decryption. Even specify the initial count of words at the beginning requires a certain degree of conjecture, though estimates expect to cover the worst scenarios to make sure that all the words in the original material has been cited correctly.
Then, what you can do to help make the process easier? I guess that we always end up reaching the same conclusion here: accept technology!
Many countries have their own laws that impose mandatory digitization of documents when it comes to formal, legal, administrative or even medical records. And it seems a good way to do it.
Documents and electronic records are replacing their counterparts in role in many sectors, but the legal industry seems to take a little longer to adjust. But while electronic documents can provide the security that supports crucial information, if something unexpected could happen to physical files, online legal documents meet the same evidentiary requirements and? benefits than the standard paper copies?
In the past, the law stipulated that lawyers had to keep printed copies of documents for seven years, which explained some of resistances which still persist against relying solely on electronic files. However, the evidence Act 1995 established that in the majority of cases, the original documents are no longer necessary, making copies of documents as good and as admissible as own originals, in the majority of legal proceedings .
In theory, then, it is perfectly feasible that the law firms will become fully electronic also.
It is better for the environment! However, even though it would be much more practical for them to do so, there are other factors that still represent them a conflict, covering completely the era of digital documentation. As the digital economy continues taking root in the legal industry, and the law changes as a result, it is possible that law firms will increase the number of records and files that retain electronically, reducing the cost of storage and increases the tranquility. However, old habits are difficult to solve, and while there are legal reasons to keep at least some printed copies, it is likely that many law firms to continue keeping printed versions in all areas. Stay tuned for the pros and cons of the digitization of documents and how the choices that we make today could determine the way that the industry could change in the future.