Medical Device Link.

Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News Magazine
PMPN Article Index

Originally Published July 2000

LANGUAGE MATTERS

I'll Be Brief

For years, pharmaceutical and medical product packagers have cut verbiage to save space. Those efforts, however, may have unintended consequences when companies sell internationally.

by Robert Sprung

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is the bane of the translator's existence. This month's column addresses the dangers inherent in tightly written English source text and the pitfalls of presenting ever-more languages in ever-more-limited real estate.

The era of smaller packaging ushered in the era of labeling brevity. With limited space, packaging experts are now like newspaper headline writers—they need to squeeze as much information as possible into the smallest of spaces. The results are often cryptic, even to colleages. Does SM stand for small, semi, or simple? Does CH stand for charge, change, or Switzerland? Will everyone see Dst Cth as distal catheter?

Translators are particularly susceptible to such problems when interpreting label copy. Consider that translators represent the gateway between an English product and its huge international audience. If you have difficulty deciphering your company's own labeling jargon, what is a translator to make of it? The probability of error can be alarmingly high if proper precautions are not taken.

Here are some guidelines for ensuring an accurate transfer from your English original to the multilingual version:

1. Write clearly. Assume that the translator has little background working with your products. Whenever possible, provide complete English versions next to the source (perhaps in a separate column). When in doubt, overannotate.

2. Use the right translators. Work with properly trained medical translators who understand the criticality of their task. Also, make sure that the process is ISO compliant and that you can—and do—audit it.

3. Always check across languages. FDA guidelines will require that each translation say exactly the same thing as the English source. If translations are not carefully cross-checked, SM might well appear as small in one language and as semi in another.

4. Your own reviewers should have the final word, as I described in my January 2000 PMP News column, "Guarding the Guards." But do not take your reviewers' comments as gospel—although one reviewer's comments may be technically correct, they may cause a translation in one language to say something different in another, which becomes obvious when the languages finally appear side by side on the packaging.

After ensuring that your text will be translated properly, you must ensure that the translation occupies the least amount of space on the label. You will, no doubt, apply some graphic or mechanical solution: you may drop certain text, use a smaller point size, or employ accordion folding. Meanwhile, consider these guidelines to shorten the output text:

1. Make space constraints clear to everyone involved. Many companies send translators disembodied text with no graphical context—in these cases, some translated versions will inevitably not fit. Consider providing an Excel table with the maximum number of characters for each translation—the next column may then hold the translation, and the following column the number of characters in the translation. A macro can highlight terms that are too long.

2. Translate outer packaging first. Insert translation often starts well before packaging translation because it takes longer. But this approach can come back to haunt you. If the insert, which has no space constraints, is translated first, copy may run long. When it comes time to put the translated name on the label, many companies find that space is far less than required, which may well entail the added time and cost of retranslating and perhaps reprinting.

Do not make changes—even minor ones—to the translation when space is tight. Changes that appear cosmetic may fundamentally alter the meaning. For example, in some languages (e.g., Spanish, French), it is common to print capital letters without accent marks. A designer might simply convert to lowercase to save space. But lowercase letters require accent marks. Therefore, a correct version can be transformed, with a keystroke, into a poor or wrong translation (some words have completely different meanings depending on the accents). Saving space can, in the end, prove very expensive.

Robert Sprung is the chairman of Harvard Translations (Cambridge, MA). His latest book, Translating Into Success, includes case studies in multilingual labeling and is available on amazon.com. To contact him, send an e-mail to robert_sprung@htrans.com or visit http://www.htrans.com.