MEDICAL translation

The pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech industries operate under strict regulatory frameworks that vary by market and by document type. A clinical trial protocol submitted to the EMA follows different conventions from one filed with the FDA, and the translation needs to reflect those differences precisely.

We work with pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, medical equipment manufacturers, healthcare organisations, and research and technology companies. Over the years, we’ve built up a detailed understanding of the regulatory landscape these clients operate in, which means we can flag compliance issues before they reach your review team.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss how we handle translation for medical and pharmaceutical companies.

We translate across the full range of medical and pharmaceutical content. On the clinical and regulatory side, that includes clinical trial protocols, investigator’s brochures, patient information leaflets, IMPDs, Drug Master Files, pharmacovigilance reports, and packaging text. We also handle scientific articles, medical journals, marketing material, educational content, and medical device documentation including IFUs, manuals, and software strings. Further down this page, we break this down into five categories that explain how we approach each type.

A clinical trial protocol and a patient information leaflet require very different writing, but both demand a translator who knows the medical sector inside out. Someone unfamiliar with regulatory conventions or clinical terminology will slow your review process down and introduce errors that are expensive to catch later.

We only use translators who specialise in medical and pharmaceutical content. For each project, we assign a linguist with specific experience in the relevant document type. A clinical protocol goes to someone with a background in clinical research. An IFU for a medical device goes to someone who understands how equipment documentation is structured and regulated.

We have both in-house translators and an extensive external network, many of whom have been working with us for over 25 years.

In the medical sector, terminology is tightly controlled. Regulatory bodies expect specific terms to be used consistently, and your own internal style guides add another layer on top of that. Getting a term wrong in a single document can create problems across an entire regulatory submission or product launch.

We build term lists and translation memories specific to your company and your regulatory context. Every project feeds back into that database, so your Danish patient information leaflet and your Spanish product summary use the same approved terminology. Your internal teams can also access these resources directly through our cloud-based tools.

We work with whatever file format your content comes in: Excel, HTML, InDesign, XML, or anything else. Our tools handle the conversion so you get translated files back in the original format and layout.

If you need DTP work to ensure layout consistency across language versions (common with packaging and labels), we handle that too. Read more about DTP and layout.

For multimedia content like e-learning modules or instructional videos, we offer voice-over and subtitling.

If your website needs translating, we can integrate directly with your CMS. Read more about the solution here.

You’ll always work with the same project manager at AdHoc Translations. They manage your projects end to end through our Translation Management System, where you can track status and pull reports at any point.

In the medical sector, this continuity matters more than in most industries. Your project manager learns which regulatory markets you operate in and which document types go through which approval workflows. That knowledge compounds over time and directly reduces the number of queries and revision rounds on each project.