Quality Assessment of Medical Translation

Translation of medical texts including experimental results achieved after many experiments is important and necessary for transferring the medical information between the physicians or physician and general population. However, many physicians claim that with medical knowledge, they can provide a high qualitative translation rather than medical translators with translation specialty. Therefore, this study was aimed to assess the quality of medical translation done by medical translators and physician to find out whether medical knowledge is enough for producing a high quality translation of medical texts or translation specialty is also required. To assess the quality of the Persian translation of medical texts done by medical translator and physician, some parts of 10th chapter of the book Management of Smell and Taste Disorders written by Antje Welge- Lüssen & Thomas Hummel were chosen randomly as the sample, and given to a medical translator and a physician. They were asked to translate the sample during a week. After a week, the translations were gathered. Both the source text (ST), and translations (TT) were analyzed and compared for their relative matching using House's model in the same manner. Any mismatch along the dimensions was an error. The results show that in translation produced by the physician, there are many overtly erroneous errors compared with the translation by the medical translator. Therefore, it is concluded that medical knowledge is not enough for producing a high quality translation and translation specialty is also required

Keywords:

Medical Translation , Quality Assessment , House's Model