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How to Choose a Quality-Focused Language Partner

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On paper, one language company's quote looks like any other: a rate, a turnaround time, the languages you need, and the total at the bottom. That does not mean that all language companies are the same, or that you should make your decision based on price or company size alone. Whether to a patient trying to manage their health or to a claimant trying to make sense of an insurance policy, words matter. The language provider you choose makes a real difference in your customers’ experience with your organization. In critical situations, it can impact their health and well-being, too.

The real differences between companies are the ones you may not think to ask about, like whether a second linguist reviews every translation, or whether translators and interpreters work from a shared glossary and style guide that keep your terminology consistent.

Diagnosing Language Access Failures in Healthcare: Five Signs Your Program Needs More Support

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In 2014, a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl arrived in an emergency department with what looked like a stomach bug. No interpreter was available. The physician communicated medication instructions through her 16-year-old brother. Those instructions were misunderstood, and she died of an adverse drug reaction.

That is the most catastrophic version of what can go wrong when translation and interpretation services are not reaching patients when they need them. The everyday version is less dramatic, but much more common. Here is just one of many possible scenarios: A discharge planner hands a packet of instructions to a patient with limited English proficiency (LEP). The patient nods politely. Two weeks later, the same patient is back in the emergency room with a complication that the instructions would have prevented, had they been properly translated.

What Quality Means in Translation and Interpretation (and Why AI Alone Will Not Get You There)

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In 1980, a teenager named Willie Ramirez was left quadriplegic after a single mistranslated word led his doctors to misdiagnose him. Decades later, an Iranian man was denied immigration relief and detained for more than two years because he and his interpreter didn’t speak the same dialect.
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These are two cases. There are thousands more, and they all share a common cause: a failure of translation or interpretation quality.
Here is the problem: Every language service company claims to be “high quality.” But if you do not speak the target languages yourself, how would you know?