Medical Text Matters:
Translation, proofreading and editing services
You wouldn't expect a brain surgeon to have a sideline in heart surgery
Medical translation is another thing that shouldn’t be improvised.
When you choose Medical Text Matters, you choose someone:
with three decades of experience ✔
I acquired a solid foundation in medical sciences at university (Neuroscience BSc from University College London) and have been building on it ever since. Before becoming a freelancer in 2010, I gained wide-ranging experience as a journalist covering the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors (2 years), a proofreader / editorial coordinator for a medical publishing company (3 years), a writer /editor for a Europe-wide portal on rare diseases (1 year), a medical writer / translator for a pharmaceutical industry service provider (3 years) and a technical writer for a vendor of preclinical research tools (3 years).
who understands medicine ✔
I’ve worked on hundreds of documents covering all major disease areas and many surgical specialties. Along the way, I’ve gained particular experience and knowledge in certain topics (see My specialisation further down the page).
who cares about what you do ✔
I find it motivating to work in a field whose ultimate goal is to improve people’s health and quality of life. It’s this internal motivation that impels me to go beyond a superficial understanding of a text, to “climb inside the author’s mind”. Only then is it possible to suggest rewordings that might better convey the author’s message or to come up with the best translation.
Clients
I’ve worked with several types of clients in the medical field:
Healthcare professionals including hospital doctors and GPs (primary care physicians), nurses, podiatrists, nutritionists, etc.
Companies involved in R&D or manufacture of drugs, biologicals and medical devices.
Clinical Research Organisations (CROs) running clinical trials.
PhD students, postdocs and other researchers.
Some past projects
Below is a representative selection of projects that I’ve delivered in recent years. In many cases, I can only provide generic descriptions because most work I do contains sensitive commercial or personal data.
Published work
Specialist texts for professionals
Clinical trial documentation including: Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) and Informed Consent Forms (ICFs); study protocols and synopses; correspondence between investigating centres, sponsor, regulatory authorities and ethics committees.
Results of clinical examinations and investigations (imaging studies, lab tests).
Articles for publication or already published in peer-reviewed journals, including an ongoing collaboration with a French university hospital.
Package inserts and Summaries of Product Characteristics (SPCs or SmPCs) for medicines.
Drug evaluation reports.
Patient safety narratives.
Hospital discharge summaries.
Training materials for a tool to implement PK-based prophylaxis in haemophilia A/B patients.
Scientific posters (editing and layout).
Specialist texts for laypeople
Press releases, mainly covering health-related matters.
Translation of articles for publication in health magazines.
Health posters and educational materials (diabetes, blood donation).
General texts
English documents such as press releases, newsletters, catalogues and marketing materials for a high-end furniture maker (long-term collaboration since 2006).
Several translations for a company selling woodcare products.
Tourist brochures and websites.
Subtitling (cosmetics and fashion videos).
I translated the following article from French:
Zufferey P, Merquiol F, Laporte S et al. (2006) Do antifibrinolytics reduce allogeneic blood transfusion in orthopedic surgery? Anesthesiology 105(5):1034–46.
The authors kindly acknowledged my contribution in the article itself and have granted me permission to use their article here. The front page and the page containing the acknowledgements section are shown below (click on them for full-size views). Click here🡕 to access the full article on the publisher’s website.
My specialisation
When referring to my specialisation, I use the term ‘medical field’ to refer to healthcare in a wider sense (medicine, surgery, nursing, pathology) and to those parts of healthcare systems, academia and industry responsible for researching, developing and introducing new and improved products and procedures for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human disease. This definition encompasses three main product groups: pharmaceuticals, biologicals and medical devices.
I have most experience and knowledge in the following therapeutic areas:
oncology,
the cardiovascular system,
diabetes,
haematology,
genetics.