Resources / Blog

5 Tips for Selecting a Medical Device Translation Company

Sep 25, 2019

Does the prospect of selecting a medical device translation company fill you with anxiety? The right company can do wonders for your brand, while the wrong translation company can cause major damage to both your reputation and bottom line. It’s an important decision to make and not one to be taken lightly. These five tips will help you select a translation company that can localize your medical device materials professionally, accurately and according to local laws and regulations.

1. Do Your Research

This cannot be emphasized enough. Only look for translation companies that offer medical translations as a specialty or as their core competency. Since this area is so specialized, you should only rely on experts who understand the complicated process. Medical translators must be subject matter experts, or even doctors, who know the regulations and certifications that are required in each country.

Check references to make sure that the vendor has plenty of subject matter expertise and that it has accumulated loyal customers over the years. Also, make sure the medical translation company you’ve chosen has a dedicated project manager who is responsive and available to you as needed.

Tip: If you’re new to medical translations, you’re going to need time to understand the process. It’s OK to ask for explanations and to expect a high level of responsiveness and customer service from your vendor.

2. Look for ISO Certifications

For medical devices and other medical translations, you should expect a translation company to have the following ISO certifications: 

  • ISO 9001:2015 – This is the international standard for quality control. It specifies general requirements for setting up a quality management system (QMS) that meets customer and regulatory requirements. This standard is intended for any organization of any size in any industry.
  • ISO 17100:2015 – This standard is similar to ISO 9001, but it’s geared towards the specific processes required to deliver quality translation services.
  • ISO 13485:2016 – This standard outlines specific quality management system requirements for companies providing medical devices and related services.

Tip: If a medical device manufacturer outsources its translations, the manufacturer will be held accountable for the work of the translation company. That’s why many medical device companies require translation vendors to obtain the ISO 13485 certification.

3. Gather Bids

When you’re researching a medical device translation vendor, it’s a good idea to seek a few different bids. This does not have to be a formal RFP process, but it’s important to make sure you are comparing apples to apples. For example, when speaking to different translation companies, make sure you provide clear and consistent project instructions and then ask for a full explanation of how the vendor will complete the required tasks, how long it will take to do so, and what the cost for services will be.

It’s especially important to understand the vendor’s quality management system. If a vendor only has one quality control step, ask why. At Morningside, our quality assurance process includes multiple rounds of editing and proofing with built-in redundancies to ensure accuracy, proper terminology and correct localization for the target audience.

4. Don’t Expect Cheap and Fast Translations

Have you heard of the project management triangle? It’s a concept that’s been around since the 1950s. In this model, there are three key elements – good, fast and cheap. Your project can be any two of these – but it’s impossible to achieve all three.

With medical device translations, the work must be good – there is simply no room for inaccuracy in this industry. If you cut corners to save money and time in the short term, you will pay for it later (products will be pulled from shelves and costly litigation can take place).

That leaves you with a choice to make about cost. If you want your project completed quickly, it’s not going to be cheap. Rush fees will be applied. However, you can save money (and avoid rush fees entirely) if you plan a project timeline with your vendor well in advance of your deadline.

5. Talk to Fellow Industry Professionals

Are you in touch with fellow medical device colleagues at other companies? Are you attending an industry trade show in the near future? Try asking fellow professionals which translation vendor they’re using and whether they’ve learned many helpful lessons along the way. It’s always better to learn from others than to experience issues first-hand.

Invitation to Connect

If you’d like more information about medical device translations, feel free to reach out to us today or request a complimentary quote. As a medical device translation company, we have all three ISO certifications and 20 years of industry experience.

Resources / Blog

How to Protect IP Rights when Outsourcing

Sep 18, 2019

Outsourcing is a well-established phenomenon in today’s global economy. Although initially associated with large, multinational companies, today outsourcing is growing among small-to-medium businesses as well. The key motivations for outsourcing include cutting costs, solving capacity issues and maintaining a clear focus on the core business. On the other hand, outsourcing raises a very critical question: How do I protect my intellectual property rights (IPR) – both for existing IP as well as any new IP that may be created? In this blog, we take a closer look at how to manage potential IPR risks without losing out on the benefits that outsourcing can bring to your company and bottom line.

Determine your IP strategy

Before jumping onto the outsourcing bandwagon, you should do an inventory of the IP that will likely be exposed. If you have third-party licensing agreements, make sure you are free to share the required IP with your outsourcing vendor. Where relevant, strengthen your IP portfolio by registering and filing patents, trademarks and copyrights – not only in your own country, but also in the countries where the outsourcing would take place.

You should also consider defining an initial outsourcing scope of work that does not expose your core IP. After you have established a good working relationship with an outsourcing vendor, you can extend the scope with greater confidence that your business-critical patents will be safe.

Make IP part of your due diligence

Finding the right outsourcing vendor is a long and arduous process. Be sure to make IP an important part of your due diligence, at several levels.

Start with the target countries themselves. Respect for IP rights varies from country to country and you should consider avoiding outsourcing to countries where IP laws are weak or poorly enforced. Two websites where you can gather relevant information are the International IP Index and Country IPR Toolkits, both of which are maintained by the US Chamber of Commerce.

Regarding the vendors, you should ensure that they have well-established procedures and a security infrastructure for protecting sensitive data. Make sure that they do thorough background checks on their employees and properly train them on IPR. While checking out their references, explore their track record of respecting and protecting intellectual property. Verify that they have insurance that will cover them for any damage you may suffer if your IP (including your trade secrets) are compromised.

Key IP issues for outsourcing agreements

When it comes to drafting the outsourcing agreement, there are a number of IP-related issues that should receive special attention. For example, the agreement should contain comprehensive, enforceable non-disclosure and non-compete sections. These issues are particularly important when your IP includes trade secrets.

The ownership of IP is also a critical issue. Not only should the ownership of existing IP be crystal-clear, but it should also be clear who owns any new IP that may be created during the outsourcing. Newly created IP is typically defined as “works for hire” that belong to the company paying for the work. But it is not unusual for outsourcing agreements to include options for mutual licensing of new IP. That’s all well and good, as long as it is clearly spelled out and understood the same way by both parties.

Tip: Organize and file every contract and agreement related to IP for easy future reference, just in case IP conflicts arise.

Establish clear communications

Poor communication is the #1 reason for the failure of an outsourcing project. Language barriers and cross-cultural misunderstandings can undermine the development of trust that is essential for a fruitful working relationship in general and for the protection of IPR in particular. All efforts invested in establishing strong communications in a multilingual, multi-cultural working relationship will go a long way to ensure successful outcomes.

Resources / Blog

Website Translation: How Do We Manage Regular Updates in 20 Languages?

Sep 03, 2019

If you manage or operate a website, chances are high that it’s powered by WordPress or Drupal, two of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in use today. These two back-end frameworks power over 76 million websites worldwide, ranging from personal blogs and self-hosted retail pages to corporate, political and government websites. If you want to make your WordPress or Drupal-hosted content available to more people, one of the most effective ways to do that is to make your website multilingual.

Traditionally, however, the process of website translation has been very complicated, involving three time-consuming steps: (1) Manually download all the source text you wish to translate from your CMS. (2) Email the source text files to your language service provider (LSP) to translate. (3) Upon completion of translations, manually upload or copy/paste the translated content back into to your CMS. This manual system is antiquated.

Instead, you should consider using an automated translation plugin that makes the website translation process a lot easier to complete. Morningside Translator for Drupal and WordPress Multilingual (WPML) both work to build a bridge between your website’s source language content and Morningside’s network of 8,000+ native linguists and subject matter experts. Both plugins allow you to monitor the status of projects, submit & approve quotes, and review & publish translated content — all within the plugin dashboards. Let’s take a closer look at these two different options.

Drupal: Morningside Translator

Morningside Translator is a proprietary Drupal translation plugin for the Translation Management (TMGMT) module within Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. It enables you to seamlessly connect with Morningside to translate and publish multilingual content for your website without ever having to leave your Drupal CMS. This removes two critical steps in the traditional process – with this plugin, you no longer need to download or upload content to/from your CMS, making it easier than ever to manage your Drupal website translations. Once you’ve installed and configured the plugin for TMGMT, you can:

  • Provide project details
  • Request a quote
  • Select a single page or multiple pages for translation
  • Choose from over 150 languages
  • Enter a project due date
  • Approve translation quotes
  • Monitor the status of each project

WordPress: WPML Plugin

The WordPress translation plugin is a translation tool for businesses that use WordPress as their CMS. Although WordPress is a great platform for managing website content, the process of translating and updating multilingual content can be extremely cumbersome and time consuming without a little additional help. That’s where Morningside and WPML come in.

Similar to Morningside Translator, with WPML you can create multilingual versions of your original website, and you can use a dashboard to manage your projects. It’s simple – you don’t need to create a new WordPress site for each language; you’re just duplicating and translating each page.

So how does it work? First, you’ll need to download the WPML plugin for Morningside Translations. Then please contact your Morningside sales representative to configure your account for the WPML plugin. If you don’t have a Morningside rep, simply contact us via our website and one will be provided to you. Once configuration is complete, you will be able to submit and approve quotes and monitor your projects from within the WPML dashboard. When translated webpages are ready, you can review the completed translations within WordPress or simply publish them.

Advantages of Using a Translation Plugin

Both Morningside translation plugins provide many advantages over the traditional website translation process, such as:

  • Dashboard – You get to manage the quoting process through a dashboard, which means no more copying and pasting or uploading content to some other directory. Instead, you simply select the webpages that you want to have translated from within WordPress or Drupal, designate the target language(s) required and the plugin will efficiently package the translation files and send them to Morningside for analysis and translation.
  • Project manager – When you use a Morningside plugin, we provide you with a professional, highly responsive project manager to act as your single point of contact. Your PM will manage the translation process, including overseeing any necessary collaboration between the translator, proofreader and in-country reviewers (ICR).
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) – Morningside can create customized translation packages for SEO content, such as meta tags, h1, titles, and transcreation of keywords.

As a result of all the automation, minimal effort is required to manage the translation process when using a translation plugin. At their core, Morningside Translator and the WPML plugin for Morningside Translations simply make it easier for you to manage multilingual websites powered by Drupal and WordPress. If you’d like to learn more about either option, contact us here.