Quality assessment of medical translations performed by the two groups of medical translators and physicians

Translating medical texts is a very risky and important task because these texts deal with human life and any mistake in their translation can be life threatening. However, physicians, as well as medical translators, do this task and believe that the quality of their translation is more better than one performed by the medical translators but due to lack of time, they have to employ medical translators for doing this task. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of medical translations performed by the two groups of medical translators and physicians using House's model. For this purpose, the book "Bate's Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking" written by Fiona R. Prabhu and Lynn S. Bickley published in 2003 (ST) and its two versions of Persian translation performed by two groups of medical translators (TT1) and physicians (TT2) were analyzed according to the steps described in the House's model and the mismatches (overt and covert errors) were determined. Then the translations were classified as over or covert translations and the reasons were described. The results show that neither medical translators (with English knowledge and translating skills) nor physicians (with Medical knowledge) can perform a high quality translation of medical texts alone and without cooperation with the other group. It was concluded that for presenting a high quality translation, medical translators and physicians should have cooperation with each other and a team of medical translators and physicians is required.