Translation is a key element in healthcare communication. Millions of Americans speak languages other than English at home. When it comes to managing their healthcare, having insurance materials in their native languages is especially valuable. With a clear understanding of their benefits, they’re able to make better decisions about their health.

For healthcare communicators and marketing professionals, what to translate – and how – are two of the biggest challenges in developing materials and managing ongoing communications.

With limited time and resources, the translation of materials often comes down to seemingly impossible choices. Do you create brochures, press releases and website pages in English only? Or do you limit translations to just a few items – and perhaps only in, say, Spanish and Chinese? Should you handle translations in-house and if you do, will you have the personnel to handle it?

The good news: a full-service translation provider gives you options and flexibility.

How translation advances your top priorities

Translation is a not a simple task, but it’s a necessary component of your communications plans. Although health insurance companies have a legal obligation to translate their materials for members, there are plenty of convincing business reasons to expand your ability to translate materials.

• Improve patient experience. Patient experience was a top priority for the healthcare industry before the pandemic, and there’s even more reason to focus on it now. As patients embrace new methods of care, there are more questions about what’s covered. In the coming months, insurers will need to clearly articulate changes to all customers, especially those with limited English proficiency.
• Increase productivity of your customer service team. When critical documents are translated and easily available through self-service options, your customer support representatives will spend less time on the phone with your members. In addition, you’ll reduce the risk of miscommunication.
• Meet important revenue-generating deadlines. Marketing and communications plans are often complex and tightly managed. Rolling out a new product or website requires numerous communications, and when revenue is at stake, missing a deadline has high costs.

By engaging a translation service provider, you’ll have a partner who can help you manage a high volume of content in multiple languages. Finding the right provider depends on knowing your specific needs – and what questions to ask. The following checklist will help you evaluate your options and get the answers you need to make the right decision.

What types of materials can you translate?

A full-service translation provider will have a solid understanding of the health insurance industry as well as a breadth of experience in the types of documents it can handle. Be sure to ask about their experience translating standard materials such as member letters, brochures and website pages.

Most importantly, the translation service provider should have experience working with specialized health insurance materials, including: Evidence of Coverage, Summary of Benefits, Denial/Approval Letters, Formularies, Member Handbooks, Benefit Summary, Medical Records, HIPAA documents and training, and Foreign Claims.

What languages do you support?

A full-service translation provider will offer the greatest efficiency because it can handle the translation of material into multiple languages at once. As you build your communications plan, you can prioritize the most common languages spoken in the U.S.: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, French, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole and Tagalog.

Also ask if they have native speaking human translators on staff to handle the languages you need. Native speakers provide an advantage: You can be certain the translation will capture the essence of your message and thus resonate with your members.

What is your process?

A quality translation service provider brings more to the table than simply transferring words from one language to another. You should expect the provider to provide a range of services. For example, editing and proofreading are essential for ensuring your message is clearly and accurately conveyed in every piece. Your corporate and marketing needs may also extend to other services such as desktop publishing, social media videos, eLearning localization and website translation.

What else is important to know?

Finally, don’t overlook the qualifications of a certified translation service provider. The team should offer health insurance subject matter experts, who are also deeply familiar with HIPAA compliance. Privacy and security are paramount, so ask if their platform is HTTPS secure and insist on a non-disclosure agreement.

Many organizations put off translation because it seems complicated. But working with a reputable translation service provider ensures accurate translation of your content. In addition, working with a full-service translation provider reduces the burden on your staff. They won’t have to spend hours creating their own translation of materials. As a best practice, be sure to have a translation management plan, which will help you prioritize materials and ensure timely translation of essential documents.

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, 21% of corporate counsel in a recent survey said they’d experienced an increase in cross-border litigation. Recent global events, ranging from Brexit to tariff fights, all but ensure this trend will continue – and with it, the need for businesses to have a multilingual eDiscovery strategy.

In releasing its findings, the authors highlighted the expected impact of COVID-19, which the consulting firm believes will drive commercial disputes because it’s “threatening supply chains, challenging contracts and changing how companies are doing business.”

Such macro events affect both the urgency and scope of cross-border litigation. So it follows that attorneys who deal with international commercial disputes will be pressured to manage multilingual eDiscovery as efficiently as possible.

That’s no easy task. Cross-border litigation and eDiscovery are dauntingly complex, especially when matters involve intricate aspects of law and span several countries. For instance, a seven-year investigation of Walmart Inc. involved subsidiaries or affiliates in four countries: Mexico, Brazil, China and India. And Uber recently faced challenges to its operations in several non-English-speaking countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Austria.

In cases like these, the scope of discovery forces legal teams to contend with a vast store of documents, in addition to all of the usual challenges that go along with preparing for negotiations and court. On top of dealing with different formats – such as Word documents, emails, text messages and spreadsheets – legal teams also must cope with material in multiple languages. It’s not unusual to find records of digital conversations in more than one language. For example, executives in a France-based firm might email their British colleagues in French and receive their answers in English.

How can legal teams navigate multilingual eDiscovery, especially when dealing with large and complex datasets? While one approach is to engage bilingual contract attorneys, organizations can also leverage technology like machine translation to accelerate document review. In fact, artificial intelligence can do much of the heavy lifting, as it can handle three times more work than a human can. Combined with human translation, this approach can shorten the process and allow lawyers to focus on only relevant documents. It’s often more economical, too.

Best practices for multilingual litigation

If you think your organization may be at risk of cross-border litigation, act now to put best practices and systems in place. This way, you’ll be ready for any potential actions even before the need arises. Understanding the steps involved in multilingual eDiscovery is a good place to start.

Step 1: Expect the unexpected

Ask about languages during the custodian interview phase. Is it possible the documents that will be collected may be in more than one language? Once you’ve collected your data, it’s important to understand exactly what you’re dealing with. More often than you’d think, collections include documents in multiple languages. For instance, you might expect your collection to be entirely in Russian, only to discover it also includes documents in French, Georgian and Italian. Even within a single document, you may find content in two or more languages.

Step 2: Use language tools to structure your hosting environment

A language detection app, which is a common but not always used feature of processing software, will help you identify both primary and secondary languages within your document set. Translating your key search terms into the appropriate languages will ensure you don’t miss any important documents in, for example, French, even though you’re searching in Russian.

When it comes time to review foreign language documents you should consider running a machine translation test to see if the English output files are good enough for a first-level review. If so, this can save time and money over the traditional method of staffing a review with bilingual contract attorneys. And machine translation may be the best choice for less-common languages, as bilingual contract attorneys fluent in these languages may be harder to find.

Step 3: Add the human element for more polished translations

Once the review is complete, you may need to produce a subset of “hot docs” for court. Though machine translation is very efficient, it isn’t always able to handle some of the specialized language used in legal documents. For this reason, “human-like” translations need to be reviewed and polished by real people. Human translators will review and correct for specialized language, capture nuance, and deliver a polished translation that’s acceptable for court. Be sure to work with a professional translation service that can provide a Certification of Accuracy.

In conclusion, when it comes to cross-border litigation, it’s best to have a “language management” plan in place. Identify the languages of the documents you have collected, separate them for processing, translate keywords for searching, use machine translation where appropriate, and finish the process with high-quality professional translations for court.

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Artificial intelligence is transforming machine translation (MT). Deep learning and neural networks have evolved into a new model – neural machine translation (NMT) – that has made MT faster and more sophisticated. But the future of translation lies in combining this new technology with human translators. Machine translation with post-editing is a rapidly developing service, and it heralds a swath of new opportunities for companies with a global footprint.

What Is Machine Learning with Post-Editing?

In 2014, researchers introduced the concept of neural networks to machine translation. Rather than memorize “windows” of words in sentences as previous models had done, neural networks look for the whole context of a particular translation. As a result, NMT produces a higher-quality translation in a shorter amount of time. What’s more, it continues to “learn” and improve.

Still, the technology has limitations. Though it’s suitable on its own for some use cases – such as getting the “gist” of an email message – it falls short when greater precision is required. That’s why machine translation with post-editing is one of the fastest growing services in the translation industry. The process is simple. Content is initially translated using NMT. Then, a skilled human translator reviews the output and edits for clarity and precision. The result is a better-quality translation – in less time.

This process is also highly efficient, an important consideration for businesses that need to translate larger volumes of content. For instance, as the internet has expanded access to a more global customer base, marketing teams must make social media and digital advertising content available in local languages. This is not an insubstantial task, especially as six in 10 international marketers don’t have support in all the local markets in which they operate, according to data from eMarketer.

However, machine translation with post-editing streamlines and simplifies translation projects. This process allows organizations to:

• Handle large volumes of content. Many translation projects involve hundreds or even thousands of documents or pages. Examples include website pages, product support documents, human resource materials, and litigation documents used in the discovery process.
• Accelerate turnaround time. Using NMT for the initial translation means human translators can focus on smaller sections of content, enabling them to deliver a high-quality translation in much less time than if they’d started the entire project from scratch.
• Achieve greater precision. Though it is fast, NMT has its limitations. While it produces significantly better translations than statistical machine translation, it isn’t yet adequate for specialized text. However, when human translators conduct post-editing on machine-translated output, they can clean it up faster while ensuring creative and nuanced text is precisely translated.
• Improve efficiency. By providing a foundational translation from which to start, NMT helps human translators be more productive. For instance, one longtime translator estimated that a good quality machine translation improves his productivity by 30% to 40%.

Working with Machine Translation with Post-Editing.

When evaluating a project for machine translation with post-editing, be sure to consider the following.

• Languages. Because of the large amount of training data needed for NMT, the technology serves some languages better than others. For example, English, Spanish, and Chinese are more widely spoken and thus will require less post-editing and time to produce. Other languages will require a native speaker to produce a higher quality translation, extending the post-editing time.
• Specialized text. Machine translation with post-editing will become more common for standard translations, but specialized content will still need the involvement of human experts. One of the limitations of neural machine translation is domain adaptation. The technology performs best in general use cases, but it’s not quite ready for specialized use cases, such as patents or healthcare.
• Sector expertise. In order to ensure the subject matter is accurately represented and is compliant with government regulations, you need sector expertise. Certain disciplines such as life sciences and manufacturing have their own shorthand and terminology. Precise translation of this type of content is more difficult for artificial intelligence to achieve, making post-editing a critical step in the process. The American Translators Association recommends working with a translator who knows your subject inside and out.
• High-stakes communications. What happens when more is at stake? Legal advisers can’t afford to misunderstand text as they determine how to proceed in a significant lawsuit. Products may not sell if the translation misses the cultural mark. Precision is essential in high-stakes communication, and the cost of errors can be high. For example, literal translations can lead to serious misunderstandings, especially in domains where words may have different meanings. A skilled linguist can ensure cultural accuracy.

When to Use Machine Translation with Post-Editing.

Machine translation services such as Google Translate are valuable for personal use or when “a sense of the content” is an adequate outcome. For example, Google Translate is ideal for tourists who want a quick translation of foreign-language signage at places they visit. Businesspeople conducting first-line research may value speed more, if they only need to get the gist of the news covered in an online article.

But for large scale projects that need to be completed quickly and accurately, machine learning combined with post-editing produces the best results. Artificial intelligence offers an efficient, cost-effective way to handle the large volume of content that businesses need to translate. However, human translators are better at capturing style, cultural nuances, and context than their machine counterparts.

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With operations spread across multiple countries and continents, it can be challenging for global companies to engage distant employees. Companies with a global workforce face many challenges when it comes to employee engagement. After all, communicating company news and policies in multiple languages can be complicated.

However, research shows diverse and inclusive company atmospheres deliver tangible benefits. According to Gartner, they accelerate innovation and improve the bottom line. Meanwhile, a recent survey by Globalization Partners found that embracing multilingualism helps organizations achieve better results overall.

At the same time, though, Globalization Partners discovered that three in 10 employees don’t feel a sense of inclusion or belonging in their organizations. Just as translation of marketing content helps companies connect more effectively with customers, translation of critical internal documents helps global businesses make all workers feel as if they’re a part of the same organization.

6 Reasons you Need to Translate Internal Communications

It may be tempting to simply declare English as your official company language. It can certainly be a faster and less complicated way to disseminate information. Yet, there are many reasons why global companies should, and in some cases must, translate internal communications.

1. Foster Diversity and Inclusion: According to Gartner, 75% of organizations whose frontline decision-making teams reflect a diverse and inclusive environment exceed their financial targets. Translating critical documents ensures universal understanding of, and higher engagement with, your organization’s mission and vision.
2. Promote Ethical Behavior: While no organization is immune from corruption or misconduct, global corporations are especially at risk. Almost half of companies have experienced economic crime and fraud, according to a 2018 PwC survey. In addition, problems are more likely to occur in subsidiaries or joint ventures far from headquarters, writes Mary Jo White, former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in Harvard Business Review. Leaders, more than compliance programs, set the tone for ethical behavior, White noted, underscoring the need to translate both messages and policies.
3. Ensure Legal and Regulatory Compliance: In some countries and states, the law requires certain internal communications to appear in the employee’s primary language. The best way to avoid legal issues is to err on the side of caution and translate all important communications. For additional insight on the types of workplace language laws in various countries, the Association of Corporate Counsel covered a number of examples here.
4. Attract and Retain Better Talent: Global organizations can’t be sure the best employee for a given role will be a native English speaker. When they fail to provide internal communications in a preferred language, employees are more likely to feel undervalued and misinformed. That makes them more inclined to look for a job somewhere else. Also, companies risk missing out on hiring future top performers if compensation and benefits materials aren’t available in local languages. Simply put, a person who can’t fully understand what comes with the job is less likely to accept it.
5. Reduce the Risk of Misunderstanding: When companies provide materials in the staff’s preferred language, everyone is sure to understand the organization’s goals and expectations. When they know what to do and how to do it, employees are more productive.
6. Improve Worker Safety: If employees can’t understand your safety procedures, they’re at much greater risk of on-site injury. Such incidents not only lead to downtime, but could result in lawsuits or possible legal penalties. While safety should be top of mind for all organizations, it’s especially important when employees are working in factories or operating machinery of any kind.

A reputable translation services vendor can work with you to ensure accurate translations of critical internal communications and help create a more inclusive, diverse environment across all locations.

 

 

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Colors can have a huge impact on the success of any communication, but they can also have positive or negative connotations depending on where you live and the culture in which you have been raised.

Below is a general list of colors and cultural symbolism you may want to consider when developing your global communications.

 Red 

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African: Good luck, anger
China: Good luck and celebration, joy, festive occasions
Hebrew: Sacrifice, sin
India: Purity
Japan: Anger, danger
South Africa: Mourning
Russia: Bolsheviks and communism
Eastern: Happiness and prosperity, worn by brides, purity
Western: Danger, love, passion, stop, anger
Middle East: Danger, evil
South American: Cruelty, success
Celtic: Death, afterlife

 Pink 

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Korea: Trust
Eastern: Marriage, femininity
Western: Love, baby girls, Valentine’s day, feminine
Belgium: Baby boys
Japan: Spring, femininity, youth

 Orange 

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China: Family, learning
Ireland: Religious color for Protestants
Hindu: Desire, courage
Japan: Warmth, energy, happiness, courage
Netherlands: Royalty, color of Dutch royal family
Western: Creativity, autumn, Halloween if with black
India: Purity, courage, sacrifice

 Gold 

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China: Money
Japan: Money, heaven
Eastern: Wealth, strength
Western: Wealth

 Yellow 

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China: Royalty, nourishing, honor, respect
Egypt: Mourning
India: Merchants
Japan: Courage, grace, nobility, childish, gaiety, illness, religion
Eastern: For the dead, sacred, imperial
Western: Hazards, coward, weakness, hope, taxis, caution, joy, happiness, energy
Middle East: Happiness, prosperity

 Green 

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African: Religion, life, success
China: Exorcism, youth, growth
Ireland: Symbol of the country, religious-Catholics
Japan: Life, future, youth, energy
Eastern: Eternity, family, health, peace, prosperity
Western: Spring, go, money, Saint Patrick’s Day, safe, sour
Middle East: Fertility, strength
South American: Death

 Blue 

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African: Peace, love
China: Immortality, strength, power
India: National sports color denoting secularism
Iran: Heaven and spirituality, mourning
Japan: Villainy
Eastern: Wealth, self-cultivation
Western: Depression, conservative, corporate, masculinity, calm, authority
Middle East: Protective
South American: Trouble

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 Purple 

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Japan: Decadence, God, insight, mystery, celebration, wisdom
Thailand: Mourning, widows
Eastern: Wealth
Western: Royalty, flamboyance, decadence, cruelty, beauty, modesty, mystery
South American: Mourning

 White 

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China: Death, mourning, humility
India: Unhappiness
Japan: White carnations symbolizes death, mourning
Eastern: Funerals, helpful people, children, marriage, mourning, peace
Western: Brides, angels, good guys, hospitals, doctors, peace, purity, virtue
Middle East: Purity, mourning
South American: Peace

 Black 

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China: Color for young boys, evil
Japan: Evil, mystery
Thailand: Bad luck, evil, unhappiness
Eastern: Career, evil, knowledge, mourning
Western: Death, evil, bad guys, rebellion, Halloween with orange
Middle East: Mystery, evil, mourning
Africa: Maturity, masculinity
South American: Masculinity, mourning

 Gray 

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Japan: Modesty, reliable
Eastern: Helpers, travel
Western: Boring, dull, sad, plain, respect

 Silver 

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African: Truce
Japan: Intelligence
Western: Stylish, money
Western: Personal power, peace, truce, death

 Brown 

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China: Earthy
Japan: Earth, durability, strength
Western: Earthy, dependable, wholesome, steadfast, health
Eastern: Earth, mourning
India: Mourning

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