A pale clinical bench beside a window: an unmarked grey folder, an empty stainless steel tray and a glass of water, in flat daylight

When the translation has to do a job

Medical and clinical translation

Records, discharge summaries, consent forms and study documents.

By the word, at the medical rate.
We read it and quote before starting

Two things make this the highest general rate on the card. The terminology is unforgiving — a dose, a route and a laterality are facts that cannot be approximated — and the reader is usually making a decision about somebody's care with the translation in front of them. Drug names are the specific trap: the same molecule carries a different brand in every country, so we give the international non-proprietary name alongside whatever the record actually says.

What a working day is. Working days, starting the working day after we have a legible copy of everything. Public holidays are not working days and neither is the Saturday morning the counter is open.

The two lists

What you are buying, and what you are not

The second column is the more useful of the two. Most of what goes wrong in this trade is somebody paying for a thing they believed they were getting and were never told they were not.

What this includes

The international non-proprietary drug name given beside the brand in the record
Units, doses and reference ranges converted only where the original states the convention, and flagged where it does not
Handwriting read where it can be read and marked illegible where it cannot, never guessed
Abbreviations expanded on first use, because a national abbreviation is a false friend
A confidentiality undertaking covering everybody who touches the file

What this is not

Nothing here is medical advice and nobody in this office interprets a result for you
We do not decide which part of a file is clinically relevant; tell us, or we translate all of it and bill for all of it
A translated record is not a second opinion

What it costs

By the word, at the medical rate.

This is quoted by the word before anything starts. The row below is Medical and clinical, and the column is whichever of the three groups your language sits in — the same three groups the certified page rate uses.

The highest general rate, because the terminology is unforgiving and because the reader is often making a decision about somebody's treatment.

Work quoted by the word, by discipline and by language group. A second translator reading it before delivery is 8 cents a word on top, and it is included rather than extra on anything certified.
The work	Group one	Group two	Group three
Legal Contracts, filings, pleadings, evidence, corporate records.	24 cents a word	29 cents a word	35 cents a word
Medical and clinical Records, discharge summaries, consent forms, study documents.	26 cents a word	31 cents a word	37 cents a word
Financial and corporate Statements, audit reports, tender documents, board papers.	22 cents a word	27 cents a word	33 cents a word
Technical Manuals, specifications, safety documentation, drawings.	22 cents a word	26 cents a word	32 cents a word
Marketing and website Campaigns, landing pages, product copy, brand material.	32 cents a word	38 cents a word	45 cents a word
Machine translation with human review Machine output, read end to end and corrected by a translator.	11 cents a word	14 cents a word	17 cents a word

The whole rate card · Estimate this job

Straight talk

Where this is bounded

This straight answer bears directly on the work above: We cannot translate what we cannot read. The rest of the ten are below — they are one argument in ten parts and each links to the others.