The importance of accurate medical translation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

By mediating medical knowledge and information across languages, translation plays a crucial role in sustaining and promoting public health. The COVID-19 pandemic made the importance of medical translation more apparent than ever. Translation helped maintain a flow of timely and accurate information across borders as well as supporting researchers’ efforts in disseminating findings on treatment and vaccine development. Due to the life-threatening potential of language errors, accuracy and precision are key elements in medical translation. The consequences of translation mistakes are magnified during a pandemic as these can have global health repercussions. In this light, this paper uses the translation of a peer-reviewed medical article dealing with treatment approaches for cancer patients affected by SARS-CoV-2 to highlight some helpful strategies and techniques that can be deployed when transferring medical language from English to Italian.