icon
background image

Reducing Language Barriers in Clinics and Hospitals

mt-g medical translation to expand its specialist services with audio and video translation

In order to safeguard the quality of care in German hospitals despite the shortage of qualified employees, more and more foreign nursing staff are being hired. At the same time, their numbers are rising across Germany – not least due to the recent influx of refugees and asylum seekers owing to the war. One of the biggest challenges in all this is the language barrier. In order to reduce its impact across all media, mt-g medical translation GmbH & Co. KG is expanding its portfolio of translation services with audio and video translation.

Seeing the Language Barrier as a Challenge

In a survey by the Deutsches Krankenhausinstitut [German Hospital Institute], 27% of hospitals stated that language problems occurred very frequently among their foreign nursing staff, making it one of the biggest challenges in terms of the working relationship. A team of interdisciplinary experts from mt-g medical translation is working to break down these language barriers. Employees from the Pharmaceutical and Medical Communication team manage translations of – among other things – advertising materials, training documents, brochures for patients and medical professionals, patient reports and now also of audiovisual media. 

“The use of videos, for example, can help to communicate information about treatment methods or diseases in a way that is easy to understand. Specialist translations form the basis for providing this information to all staff in various languages,”

says Isabel Schenker, Team Leader for Pharmaceutical and Medical Communication.

Transferring Multimedia Content

The basis for video translation is transcription, where the spoken source material is translated into written text. This text is then translated by specialist native speaker translators into one or several target languages. mt-g medical translation offers two options for integrating the translated text into the video. Firstly, the translation can be imported into the video file as professionally rendered subtitles. This means that the translation is inserted into the video without obscuring the video content. The second option is to add the translation in the form of a voice-over or dubbing. For voice-overs, the translated script is recorded by a native speaker and the text is overlaid over the original voice. By contrast, dubbing involves removing the original sound track from the video and replacing it with the translated, professionally spoken script. Both options can also be combined.