Localization of clinical research

Abstract

Clinical research using human participants to further medical knowledge has been at the forefront in 2021. Clinical research studying the efficacy of treatments can be categorised in two broad categories as ‘observational studies’ or ‘clinical trials’. Written from the perspective of a localization project manager at Vitaccess, which conducts global digital research for biopharmaceutical companies, this paper discusses five core challenges that impact the localization of such a study launched in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Japan, the UK, the US and Canada, conducted via a smartphone app. The localization project manager role provides a bridge between translators, revisers, ethics bodies, authors, legal, and medical reviewers, enabling oversight to keep the balance between launching the study globally and enabling each country to have the content and structure tailored to their cultural and linguistic expectations through localization. The main challenges in localizing a real-world evidence study is the complexity and volume of ethical, legal, and medical feedback required for the content of the study, which is further complicated by the need to target different countries and languages. Subjectivity and variance in the feedback per country also pose difficulties. International harmonisation of ethical, medical, and legal reviews of such global studies could streamline the process.

When fake news comes with translation: A study of perception toward coronavirus-related news translation into Thai

“…The pandemic has demonstrated the value of freely disseminating health-related news while highlighting the possibility that "anyone" who considered themselves an "able" translator, as this study contends, could take the liberty of translating critical health news without proper translation training, which can lead to fake news in the target culture. This would undeniably affect the work of professionals in the localization business who try hard and translate against the clock to produce practical and correct translations (e.g., Anichini & Nemeth, 2020;Richards, 2021). Concerning target readers, our results suggest that age, time constraints, the priority of family, technology literacy, and cognitive effort all play a part in the decision to double-check translated news.…”