Pharmaceuticals/Marketing
Website translation and localization with notarized declaration of accuracy
Cultural & linguistic consulting, translation/adaptation, localization, QA Testing
Spanish for the US Market
12,500 words, 3 rounds of QA Testing
3 weeks
Paragon was approached by an interactive branding and marketing agency to localize a website for one of their pharmaceutical clients. This non-branded website was designed to provide information to patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. Paragon was referred to the project by an agency employee with whom we had worked during their tenure at a large pharmaceutical company.
The agency wanted to ensure that they chose a vendor who had experience translating, adapting and localizing websites and collateral materials for the pharmaceutical industry. The issues that Paragon had to address before embarking on the translation were the tone in which the original website had been written and the localizability of the content. The English original was written in a very informal tone, which when translated into Spanish would not allow the reader to grasp the seriousness of the information. Additionally, the original text contained too many idiomatic expressions that do not exist in other languages.
First, we put the text through our rigorous Cultural & Linguistic analysis process to thoroughly analyze the copy, determine the writer’s intent and message, and finally to adapt the English into a tone that would have the intended impact when translated into Spanish. During this process, we also removed troublesome idiomatic expressions and “Americanisms” in order to obtain a conceptual equivalent in the target language. The client was provided with a report outlining our findings and offering alternative solutions, and it was ultimately their decision which changes to accept and which to ignore. In order for the end client to linguistically validate our translations, they hired a third-party language provider to back translate our work into English. The back translation confirmed the accuracy and completeness of our work. In addition, all of the notes and suggested changes were deemed stylistic or unnecessary and the client accepted our original version without changes.