14 Jul /20

Pharmaceutical Translations: 600,000+ Japanese Characters for Our Pharmaceutical Client from the Republic of Korea

Working Across Time Zones: Translating 600,000+ Japanese Characters for Our South Korean Client
Pharmaceutical Translations: 600,000+ Japanese Characters for Our Pharmaceutical Client from the Republic of Korea

For several years now, our UK office at EVS Translations has been managing pharmaceutical translations for a major pharmaceutical company based in the Republic of Korea. There is an eight-hour time difference between the offices, but the partnership runs smoothly despite this challenge.

Pharmaceutical translations for a regulatory affairs team

The latest project for this South Korean Pharmaceutical company involved translation of 600,000+ Japanese characters into English for its regulatory affairs team. This is handled by our specialist pharmaceutical translators who understand the complex terminology and who can skilfully re-produce content within all assigned deadlines. Quality is vitally important for regulatory teams since the documentation forms the basis of the drug registration process.

While clients sometimes make changes to content as production gets underway that wasn’t the case for this project. Last-minute editing can complicate the process and an eight-hour time difference also demands careful planning and clear communication.

Quality assurance for clients: coordinated Q&A sessions with the translator team

At EVS Translations, large projects for clients are continuously monitored as part of our ISO certified Quality Management standards (ISO 17100 and 9100). For large and complex projects such as this pharmaceutical translation, our project managers coordinate a QA process during which the linguistic team assesses the content to ensure all terminology and stylistic requirements are being adhered to.

Source content from clients sometimes contains deviations from standard terminology or style, so it’s important that there is a scheduled opportunity during production in the form of a Q&A session. The project manager coordinates this session initially with the translator team. Once this is complete, the project manager passes any outstanding queries to the client for clarification.

The objective is not only to deliver accurate translations back in the desired time frame, but also to ensure that the content is managed and processed in a way which will deliver the greatest value over the long-term.

One of the biggest challenges of large-scale translation is maintaining consistency so that, as the volume of content grows over projects and languages, no deviations start to develop.

Smooth communication is key between the client and our team

As emails from the client came in relating this project, the dedicated account manager at EVS Translations made a point of getting responses back in good time to avoid delays. It’s sometimes surprising to see what time e-mails do come in—work hours in South Korea are notoriously long.

This time difference can be a benefit: as the team in South Korea goes home for the evening, our linguistic and technical teams can put in a day’s work and have smaller projects back by the morning for the client.

This Japanese translation project was successfully delivered back to our client in South Korea and our teams will continue to support this pharmaceutical company, right here from the UK.

If your pharmaceutical business requires careful management of translation work, contact our team today. They can advise you on workflows and turnaround times, as well as the different strategies available to manage high-volume translation demand.

EVS Translations UK Ltd.
+44 (0)115 964 4288

EVS Translations USA Inc.
+1 404-523-5560

EVS Translations GmbH
+49 69/82 97 99-99