S03E13: Translation Services for the Life Sciences Sector

Duncan Shaw

Well, thank you very much, Sultan. I appreciate you having me today.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I am so glad that I have you on this show and there are a lot of people who would be very happy to hear from you. But before we get started, please say a few words about yourself and about your work in in the language industry.

 

Duncan Shaw

Well, sure. I’m Duncan Shaw. I’m President of DTS Language Services. We are headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carlina in the US and we are coming on 50 years old. So we are one of those old standing Grand Daddy translation companies that maybe a lot of people have never heard of, but we’ve been around a long time and hope to continue to be around.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thank you, there’s a lot of history in there. So 50 years is how old the company is, but how did you find yourself in this industry? Was it by choice or an accident?

 

Duncan Shaw

You know, a lot of people like to say, I kind of fell into this and I kind of fell into that and I’m not going to go there. I came out of college working in financial services and I learned about the time value of money. I learned about planning, I learned about business planning and financials, and at some point I was working for Glaxo Smith Kline, back then Glaxo Welcome and stock options administration, and I enjoyed that role. But I didn’t like working for a large lockstep company, I realized I wasn’t happy there so I began to look around to other opportunities and interview and I remember coming home from my interview after DTS and my wife said, well, how did it go? And I said I can tell you which offer I’m not going to get. I’m not going to get an offer from this DTS Language Services.

 

The reason is Sultan I had a fever, I had an awful sickness and I showed up to the interview soaking wet because there was a torrential thunderstorm. I didn’t bring an umbrella. I was trying to tell myself off in the men’s room before I went up to the interview. I did the best I could. I was seeing three of the interviewer even though there was just one person and I was trying to look in the middle. And sure enough, that was the offer that I got. They said that I sounded very relaxed and confident in nonchalant. So little did they know why, and I learned about the translation and localization field the hard way as an outsider. So many different cultural variants, but that’s the spice that made it fascinating and interesting and invigorating. but I took my knocks and I learned the hard way, after many years I went into project management. As a matter of fact, my very first week I remember my manager saying here’s 78 pages of Arabic, you need to go in to visit with the client and research triangle and come back with the sale. So go ahead and ask me if I made the sale.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Did you?

 

Duncan Shaw

No. I did not. But I began to learn a lot, and that was the beginning of a long journey. I had the opportunity after several years of working with the company and working it my way up the ranks and putting out fires to acquire it with a partner in 2005, which I did. And that was a 7 figure investment at the time that I wasn’t sure if it was the right move or not. But I had always wanted to own a business. I was passionate about language services, and I saw potential in it. So, lo and behold, here we are today in 2022.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wow, what a history. Now, Duncan, I’m interested to know about your perspective of this industry, you know, since you joined. And the way you obviously entered this industry is also fascinating. How did things evolve and change during your tenure in this industry? What stood out to you? What has actually, you know, impacted you from the time that you started with DTS until today?

 

Duncan Shaw

Well, there’s always been a lot of industry posturing, as there are in many industries. Who is bigger, who has more offices, who has more prominence, who has more certifications in this without the other thing, and in this era of big data, of AI, of machine translation, that impacts all of our lives, I realized that as a smaller business, we represent the voice of small business in translation and localization that we couldn’t compete with, that we couldn’t compete with that noise. So I decided, let’s hide in plain sight, and our motto became every word counts and every person matters, and I believed in that because I came across so many translators and people have such a misguided notion of what translation really is. And translators are so committed and work so hard and are often unheralded with the hard work that they do that goes unrecognized.

 

And I really saw that it came down to the micro and not the macro. And I think that in our zeal to grow and our zeal to look ahead for the future, so many of us fail to just look at today, where we are today, where we are at this moment. And that became our differentiator in a way. So part of what I’m saying is the more things change, the more they stay the same because what happened in the 60s, 70s and 80s, I mean DTS was started in 1973 is largely going on today. You have translators working, maybe with different tools and technology as technology has grown and expanded, but so much is the same and what I have noticed since about 2000, I think in many industries sometime around 2000, there was much greater interest and reliance on return on investment, especially for institutions that became publicly traded companies.

 

What really counted was return on investment, and so there was massive, that was the start of massive client acquisition and mergers and acquisitions and translation, localization and so many other industries. So I’ve noticed that for sure, like we have over the past 15 to 20 years, increasingly so many people come up to me and say you’re not supposed to be here. Why weren’t you gobbled up by one of the big box enterprise translation companies by now, so we staunchly have remained independent. But my message is really the more things change, the more they stay the same nowadays, just with changing technology.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Right. And with all of this that you’ve witnessed in the past few years, how do you see this industry heading into the future?

 

Duncan Shaw

Well, my crystal ball is in the shop right now, of course. So we don’t know. I think that technology, of course, is going to become more and more prominent. Whether machine translations and machines replace the human entirely is anybody’s guess. We’ve been hearing since the 70s that automation and technology were going to replace humans translators, and it has yet to fully happen. It’s escalating. I think that there’s going to be a mushrooming need for language services in general, depending on the source. We hear about 30 to 50 billion dollar a year industry and language services. I don’t see that shrinking. I think that the more technology and machine translation comes into play the more that will introduce work for traditional language service needs and all varieties of needs. The industry is enormously splintered. It’s enormously fragmented. So I think there’s huge opportunity for anyone that has an interest and strong desire to go into it, wherever their goals may be.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, today, you know, I would like to speak to you about our industry and about your expertise, something you do every day. I would like us to discuss delivering exceptional translation services for clinical trials and working with CROs or contract research organizations. That’s what it stands for I guess. Give me a high level view of what this space looks like.

 

Duncan Shaw

I would say the encapsulating phrase in the life sciences clinical science market is risk mitigation. There is so much at stake if you have a 50 or 100 million dollar clinical trial. If you have medical device products and they’re trying to be released and approved in Europe, new biotechnology entrants into the field that there’s a very staunchly conservative nature of the buying market. So they are concerned about pain and risk avoidance much more so than they are potential gains. So I think that you have to start with that. You have to have a very conservative localization outlook. Close enough isn’t good enough, and it almost becomes obsessive. It almost becomes extreme, but a lot of buyers in the clinical space are looking for exactness, and I think what helped DTS become more favorable to that is many years ago we started out gaining a reputation in patent translation and as you may know translating patents is about the most ultra-specific of endeavors as there is. It is so incredibly detailed and specific. I myself was tasked with proofreading patent translations into English, and I probably have proof-read hundreds of them. Dutch to English, Spanish to English, French to English, it just goes on and on and I think that became a good Crucible for DTS to go into clinical trials and the life sciences space because of that conservative nature, because of that risk mitigation outlook and the fact that little hinges swinging big doors here, if you get something wrong, there can be enormous consequences. So there’s constant paranoia in translation, as you know Sultan, we’re always second guessing ourselves. We’re always trying to be perfectionists and I think that just goes up by a factor of 10 and in the clinical space.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wow, well thank you for that introduction to this area. I know that this is a very sensitive space when it comes to errors and then accuracy, but let’s talk about, you know, something different. So let’s talk about your organization, what it does in this specific niche, and how did you find success here?

 

Duncan Shaw

I think that we found success by focusing on what I consider reliability, listening, good intake procedures and trust. I think in the world today, whether we’re talking about our next door neighbors, whether we’re talking about our fellow colleagues in an industry, whether we’re talking about our leaders, there’s a huge scarcity of trust, and for whatever reason, people have looked to me and said, oh, probably this guy doesn’t have sharp axes in the back of his truck where he does have axes, but hopefully they’re dull and they’ve said let’s hitch her wagons with DTS. Let’s give them a try. I think when the you know what hits the fan in life and things really get serious, people look into each other’s eyeballs and say, can I trust you? And there’s this reptilian brain response that we have, friend or foe? Can I trust this person? Can I work for this person? Do I want to trust my career, my job, my family’s livelihood with this organization?

And I think the DTS is excelled in a micro way, informing trust and then following through on that, make admitting when we make mistakes, which we do to we’re human, but being there, being accountable and growing partnership, and that’s an overused, cliche word partnership, but that is the crucible of what DTS has formed as a relationship is connectivity and trust. Are we relatable to a buyer? Uhm, sometimes we’re not. We have to consider different cultural types of organizations, different types of personalities at the helm, different decision makers, different needs. Sometimes we’re not the best fit? But those are, I think, the three words for me is connectivity, reliability, and trust.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So speaking of trust, let me actually ask you to tell me how do you manage that trust deficit that exists today in the world? How do you present DTS and your entire team and yourself obviously to a potential client that would want to do business with DTS? How do you want… how do you earn their trust if they have never done business with you before?

 

Duncan Shaw

There’s a wonderful book by Todd Calponi called the Transparency Sale, and that really changed my outlook a few years ago. And we’ve always been rather transparent, so instead of keeping your cards close to the vest. I think that we’ve decided to be open. I think that people don’t trust Amazon reviews and five star reviews the way that they used to. They trust three or four-star reviews, so I would much rather enter a prospective buyer or bid situation and say, you know, we’re not the big box enterprise company that you may be looking for or a small micro company or response if you’re going to have the mobile number of the president. But if you’re looking for that big box, entrepreneurial enterprise level company, we’re not it. So I think that helps a lot again in. Opening your proverbial kimono and building trust from the get go.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s actually look at again clinical trial space and let’s break down what translation in this space includes and how is it different from a standard translation project. I know that it’s accuracy is super important here, so please walk us through what a typical project looks like.

 

Duncan Shaw

I think that what we try to do is understand what the goal and objective of the localization need and what the translation need is to begin with. And sometimes we will challenge our buyers in our audience. Why do you need this translation done? What does success look like for you when it’s done and over with is it measurable? Can you tell us if it was a success or not? Sometimes the answer is we simply need to have is to comply with regulatory requirements. That’s it. I was just told to get a translation quote and that’s it. But if you’ve got an 80 country, you know, 100 language, need for patient recruitment, documents, for testing, for all manner of life science, clinical needs, it becomes more complex rather quickly. And so I think that it stems with being able to articulate your translation convention, your translation philosophy.

 

Everybody thinks they know what translation means. But if you ask 100 different people, maybe you don’t get 100 different opinions, but you’re going to get dozens, you’re going to hear people say, well, I want my Chinese translation to not read like a translation and I kind of say well, why not? That’s what it is. We have some CROs and some clinical buyers say it’s OK if this reads like a translation. This is not a Harry Potter novel. This is not literary translation. So I think being able to articulate your translation convention and your philosophy with your vetted translators, with your staff so that everyone is on the same page. The biggest failure of translation companies is to convey expectations is to be able to know what your expectations are and to share them so that they go across different cultures and languages and staff levels.

 

And you might not completely all be on the same page, but you should all be largely on the same page. In clinical trials translations, yes, it has to be exact so when we speak with new translator, Sultan, we might say you have to abide and be faithful to the source content. Well, guess what? Every translator says that oh yes, yes, I’m faithful to the source content. I get that. And I’m saying I don’t know if you know how literal and specific we really mean we don’t want you to add supporting little prepositions in phrases or little omissions. Because really, who cares, right? The French reader, that you know this yellow doesn’t read French here. If we add a few helping words, or don’t literally include every word, who’s going to know? And I think there are many cases where that’s exactly what goes on, and no one does know. Do you happen to play any tennis, Sultan, by any wild chance? I’ve never asked you this.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m not a tennis player, but I watch tennis often and I love that that game.

 

Duncan Shaw

So if you and I are playing an informal game of tennis at the park… do you know what a foot fault is? A foot fault is where the server can’t cross the service line with their toe during the serve, or they get there’s a fault for that. Well, if you and I are playing a friendly game of tennis in the park, probably we aren’t going to call foot faults on each other. Maybe we are, I hope not. I hope you’re not that competitive.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m not.

 

Duncan Shaw

So if we’re not going to call foot faults, so what’s to stop me or you from walking right up to the net and pounding the ball over? The reason I make this analogy is with respect to our translation convention in our philosophy. If you’re not going to be very tight and very rigid and adding an extra preposition, omitting a helping word because I want to help my people, whatever the rationale might be, if that’s OK this quickly becomes a very slippery slope into writing whatever you want in the Spanish, writing whatever you want in the German, the Romanian, the Italian. This goes on routinely. This happens very often, most of the time there are not consequences until there are, and that’s the problem.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And I’m assuming you have a process in place, so let’s talk about that Duncan. Please share a few thoughts on designing a process to do exactly that for translating clinical trials or working with CROs in general that yields good results again and again. It’s repeatable.

 

Duncan Shaw

Yes, and this is the Holy Grail that we’re all seeking, right? It starts I think you’d agree with well written English, well written source language if it’s not English, it starts hopefully with content that is suitable for translation. Most of the time in the United States translation is an afterthought. It’s a bolt on. It’s an add on. We receive documents all the time, unfortunately, they haven’t been spelling grammar checked. They have apparent omissions that have poor punctuation. They have inconsistencies. They have inserted comments. They aren’t clean and ready to go. We wonder if they’ve been approved or who in the world approved them. So you’ve got to start with that. That would be my first advice. If you have good documentation, that’s well written and suitable for translation for again, what your objectives are. A patient recruitment document is going to be different than an informed consent is going to be different than a medical label, is going to be different from an IFU. So if you have good claim documentation to begin with, if you have a clearly disseminated translation philosophy with your linguists, if there is an editor and checking validation process by another qualified party. I think much of the time Sultan the editing, review, QA process has been bypassed. today it has been bypassed well beyond what most buyers understand or recognize. I don’t know if you agree with me or not there.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I do, I do, yes.

 

Duncan Shaw

So there has to be well written documentation that has to be translated by the right person. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube if the wrong translator is selected, it has to be properly edited and checked, and a good validation process does not mean redoing the translation. Now everyone can be an editor of a translation. We’ve got to have their restraint, which is very difficult. It’s got to be checked one more time for formatting for consistency. It’s got to run through automation tools for grammatical diagnostic checks and things that can save time and energy for sure, but I think that the human review of it one last time before it goes to the end buyer is critical as well. But the most important gradient, I think, is the selection of the lead translator.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Right, and Speaking of which, uh, you know, do you as a supplier to CROs work with them to develop things such as specifications and guidelines on how these processes work and what type of requirements you should mandate from the translators and so on, or is this something that the clients must do themselves in order to , you know, work with multiple vendors and deliver a consistent experience?

 

Duncan Shaw

Yeah, that’s a great question. Generally, we defer to the market. Many of our life science and CRO sponsor buyers, IRBs, they all have their own independent checks and balance systems. They all have their own developmental procedures of when a document is ready and approved, so we don’t believe in correcting content in a foreign language, we have to exactly mirror what has been portrayed and read for very good reason. There are organizational compliance reasons and committee approval events that happen beyond our scope of understanding. So I strongly believe in sharing translator remarks and suggestions and recommendations, but we can’t just apply those things, those elements ourselves, even if there’s a strong chance that we’re probably right. What if we’re not right? What if there are underlying reasons? You have to be so conservative in the pharmaceutical world, in life sciences and be an advocate for clients, be advocate for all of these parties. But you can’t just make judgments, and you can’t apply language without permission and clarity.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

The question I guess was more focused towards how you communicate this need for accuracy and sticking to a specific language or brand or style to the translators when you have multiple people involved or how does the client do this when they have multiple vendors involved like DTS or maybe there’s another organization that’s also working there, because accuracy in this space is of absolute, you know, premium importance, paramount importance, that is. So how, how do we do this? Who comes up with that guidelines or specifications for translation?

 

Duncan Shaw

I think it’s the Wild West, to be quite blunt. I think I we see everything across the border that you do as well. Over the years, I’ve been interviewed by tech companies and tech markets to perform $100,000 website localization projects based on our sample translation of the sales letter, that they awarded those decisions to us. Completely outlandish apples to oranges situations. We’ve seen translation evaluations by buyers that were completely inappropriate. We’ve performed English back translations of documents and we’ve had buyers run a compare file of the back translated content against the source content and say, look at all these errors. This looks like a Christmas tree here. So there’s rampant ignorance of language and what quality translation means. And that stems back to what the goal of the organization’s translation is to begin with.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

When you’re dealing with CROs, in particular, what do they look for in a partner in order to acquire good translation output? What is important to them that a company like DTS should build KPI’s around that so you know you know exactly what the clients want and you have success metrics that you have to hit all the time.

 

Duncan Shaw

I think in the case of the CRO market, they’re more in the business and sales trenches and if it is linguistically acceptable and is not going to cause any adverse events if you will, to the study, then that’s the primary directive. They’re trying to consent a patient at a site in Cincinnati by next Tuesday. How quickly can you get these 12 consent form? Translation is done. Is it going to be certified? Is it going to be ready to go? Perhaps the most KPI, most important KPI, is going to be timeliness. Yes, time is always the enemy in translation as you know. So we require a 95% or higher on time delivery rate. And I don’t know what the industry standard is that you have some better background than me on that. But I know Sultan, it’s not close to 95%.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

It’s not. I think it’s around 89% in my personal opinion. I don’t know if there’s even a benchmark for it.

 

Duncan Shaw

Yeah, and 89% to me is pretty darn good. But would you or I eat at a restaurant with the cleanliness and sanitation sticker that says 89?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That’s low.

 

Duncan Shaw

It becomes relative, right? And there are numerous stakeholders that the CRO of different parties involved, if you’re a day or three late, if you’re a day or two late with the translation, that’s a big deal that affects a lot of dominoes and a lot of plans in effect in a lot of milestones. So if there’s been an acquisition of a company in France and 14 manuals have to be translated and there’s a hard deadline date, and a lot of things happen after that. If there’s, if the translations are late, if they’re incomplete, that holds up so many other mile markers. It’s kind of like the last mile to what often is a billion dollar infrastructure and there again that that’s where that little hinges swing big doors analogy comes back into play. Every word counts and every person matters, right? That’s where it matters critically.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s shift gears and talk about what gets translated in in this space and clinical trials and so forth. But first of all, who creates them and what does the output looks like that gets translated? You already mentioned about 0 tolerance or the small amount of tolerance for errors. Then obviously it needs to be super accurate. You have multiple parties reviewing and QAing validating that it’s correct. But let’s go back to the you know upstream, who creates these content and how do they look like?

 

Duncan Shaw

As vendors in the service, we wish we knew about more of this ourselves. We receive source documents, we are told they’re approved to translate them into these 5 languages, into these 20 languages, into Spanish, with back translation wherever the case may be. We know in clinical trials of course that the IRB Institutional Review Board is responsible for protecting the welfare of the patient approving documents, a document cannot be used in a clinical trial that has not been IRB approved and often central IRB and other IRBs will provide template documents and create the documents and as well as approve them. Other times we hear of documents that have been drafted by other parties but their IRB approved. It depends on the type of document. Is that a patient recruitment document? Is it a patient diary? Is it a case report form? Is that the protocol? Is it a landing page on the web for a patient? Is it patient forwarding or not? A big problem in translation in the United States is that it’s simply not regulated to begin with. And this is something that I like to educate a lot of life science buyers about anyone who is bilingual in the US can put their sign on a shingle and provide clinical translations. So This is why you hear about so many botched translations that threaten the integrity of a clinical trial regardless if the documents have been approved to begin with.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Do you think that standardization such as the ISO standards and so forth, if people are, if organizations are certified against those they would provide an extra layer of confidence to CROs or other clinical research type of buyers that may need accuracy, you know, knowing that their vendor is certified, someone has audited them and there is a degree of trust in there or would you see rather regulation in place?

 

Duncan Shaw

I think that ISO and other certifications are what I might describe as a professional feather in one cap. If a particular translator is organizationally certified, what does that mean? If they written a check enough times until they passed the exam, I think that that denotes a certain professional commitment. And all things being equal, we would view that translator with, as I say, a feather in their cap. I think that any of us would feel better driving over a bridge that has been structurally certified, so I see the absolute critical nature and validation of certifications in some instances. However in language services I have seen organizations that are ISO and other certified, uh holdings, and it’s all over the board in terms of consistency, of quality of process and so I wouldn’t necessarily say by default that an ISO certification is the panacea, is the answer to everything, it’s one plank in the process. It’s a very important plank. And I see the value in it. I see the inherent value in bearing an organization. However, I also see it often as a check mark on a form more than anything else. You really have to do your due diligence as a buyer about who you’re hitching your wagon with and really ask hard questions. And if the translation company, how willing are they to answer those questions, and to open the curtain behind the wizard of Oz or not?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So let’s actually talk about how a translation company is different that specializes in this sector versus others. Can you share a few words about the make up of your production team? Do you need people that specialize in this vertical in order to execute translation of clinical trials?

 

Duncan Shaw

This is a this is a great question too. A lot of people think by nature that a someone in the professional uh trends, doctors, lawyers, engineers are going to make fantastic engineers and often these are the professionals, these are the linguists that we have the most trouble with. So yes, and the reason is by virtue of their rigorous training, let’s take medical doctors, physicians, they can’t help themselves so often by correcting the text in the translation, and it begins that slippery slope between translating what is actually said in the source content and revision, rewriting editing it uhm, making editorial copywriting suggestions. Maybe we’re going to move this adverse event bullet point from the 4th place down to the second place. Maybe I’m going to provide an acronym explanation at the bottom of this table because it doesn’t exist in the source English. This happens all the time with professionals, they just can’t help themselves, I think by their training and their subject matter expertise is invaluable, no doubt about it, but I think that what was worked best for us is about a one third, one third one third breakdown of people in clinical trials as far as our linguist field force. The first third of that tends to be MD’s or PhD is typically in one of the hard sciences. They’ve got to be subject matter experts.

 

The second third of linguists that we find best works for clinical trials are former career professionals that worked in Life sciences in a former career and went into translation afterwards. Maybe they were a hospital administrator in Switzerland. Maybe they worked for a pharmaceutical company in Canada or New Jersey. Maybe they were a nurse or radiology assistant, so they understand the field, but they aren’t necessarily an MD or PhD. And I think the third group of our field force that works best in this, in this recipe, if you will, are true polyglots, true linguists who know what dictionaries and glossaries and terminology bases to consult. So whereas the subject matter expert might say the only thing that matters is one doctor talking to another doctor, one clinician talking to another clinician. The true linguist is going to say, well, you know, consistency does matter, patient retention is going to matter. So we have to adhere to these certain language standards, whereas the subject matter expert tends to downplay that a little bit and you’ve got to find a harmony between all of those.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood. Duncan, given the sensitive nature of the content that a translation company will come across and translating research material like clinical trials, what type of cyber security, data protection and other types of safeguards should be in place to ensure compliance with laws such as HIPAA or, you know, there’s several other health related regulations? Do you have to wrestle with those in order to make sure that you’re always compliant?

 

Duncan Shaw

I think that the answer to that is that you have to invest in a cut above what you think the minimum is going to be. Data protection, cyber security today is of paramount importance to me personally and professionally for DTS, you know, we’ve made investments with our servers and IT infrastructural investments that encrypt data of course, but that we mandate certain conventions amongst our staff, with password managers, with password changes, even with our clients and so yes it’s a headache to have to change passwords and they have to do updates and two factor authentication. Absolutely it is. But there’s no choice. There’s no choice in this day and age.

 

The escalation of data breaches and information losses and being shared with improper parties is escalating at very high levels, this threatens the integrity of clinical trials, it threatens the safety of patient information. So part of it is we have to dovetail with the buying organizations requirements. So if they require that no documents end up in the cloud in one shape form or another, then we adhere to that. If they require that machine translation is not used, which some of our buyers by the way specify that, then that’s the protocol that we have to follow. So again, that intake procedure in listening to a CRO and listening to a pharmaceutical company, you don’t want to prevent the documents from being used because some convention was not adhered to when it comes to cybersecurity. So you’ve really got to invest in a standard beyond the minimum today with that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s shift our focus to the supply side. What type of translators do well with healthcare in general, and in particular with translation of clinical trials? You mentioned that you work with doctors and other healthcare professionals, are there any specific qualifications that make them a better fit? I guess this question is more to answer there are, you know, those thoughts or inquiries that freelancers within our industry listening to this podcast may have. How can they enter this space?

 

Duncan Shaw

I think that if you have most translators in general have hyper attention to detail. This is one of the things I love about translators. As much as we love our own content, our own websites, or on help documentation, our own training manuals, no one will read it harder than a translator. Well, so you gotta have passionate attention to detail. I think attention to detail is actually lacking today. I don’t know if you agree with me Sultan, but there are so many people that think they have attention to detail that they do not.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

No, I agree with you 100%.

 

Duncan Shaw

It’s a funny thing. It’s a quirky skill. So we find that the translators that succeed in the clinical trial space are those that have a hyper attention to detail. There are good listeners that take feedback well. There are some translators that do not take feedback well. We regularly provide feedback for translators. And if we don’t see change, desire change, if they’re not willing to work with us, then we don’t work with them. It has to be that cut and dry. It is the linguists who are open to feedback, and, by the way, we have to be open to feedback as well too. No one has all the answers, but standing with our translation convention and our requirements and our translation philosophy, they have to be able to grow and learn. So it’s not our responsibility to train them. They should have to come on board with a certain level of senior level accomplished training to begin with, but if you are open to feedback and suggestion and receptive to that, those are the ones that grow faster and fall in line with us. Our primary medical Spanish translation team start gosh, in 1988 and back then they are not where they are today and that just came from a willingness to fall down. By any chance do you ski or no?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I don’t. My kids do, but I don’t.

 

Duncan Shaw

So the fastest way I thought that they learned how to skate was by falling down. And the same with being a new translator in the clinical trials or other space, you’ve got to be willing to make mistakes and push yourself out there and grow. Talk to other linguists more senior than you. I think that more people are willing to help others along if they’re willing to listen and take feedback.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And how do you determine if a translator is qualified and competent to handle translation of clinical trials in their language? Or, you know, for example, if you need a new translator to join your team, what’s the process like?

 

Duncan Shaw

There are some baseline requirements that we have. We’ll say you must have five years minimum full-time proven translation experience. But really, we’re looking for senior level people with decades of experience under their belt who have translated similar documentation in the pharma world hundreds and hundreds of times. They’ve done this. It’s old hat. It’s what they specialize in. We aren’t going to be all things to all people in all markets, and so we look for linguists that have those earmarks, and it’s pretty telling usually when you find them. Sometimes the you know they can pull the wool over your eyes a little bit, but not usually. One thing that we do not believe in are free translation samples. I think that translation samples are the bane of the industry. They’ve long been controversial. I think there are cases where other parties are performing translation samples you just don’t know. There’s not a foolproof method. There’s always an interview vetting process that we have, we want to speak live and see live or translate.

 

There’s a big problem, I think, in localization today is that there’s this idea of the business development people, the sales reps, the C-level people meeting as generals and treating the translators as if there’s some sort of, you know, cannon fodder down on the field and they don’t even know who is carrying out the translations. I’ve heard previous guests on your podcast show talk about this idea, well their resources, they’re not really our resources and we don’t take that view. We take a different view that we don’t own the resource as an independent translator unless they’re an employee perse, but we want to bring them in as part of the DTS family. And we very much do want to know them. We want to know what credentials they’ve received, what awards they’ve received. We want to know their pitfalls and foibles and strengths, so I think that a problem is that not enough translation companies get to know as individuals the translators themselves.

 

When we have our interview, Sultan, and speak with translators, I can tell you time and time again they say no one has asked us to do this. This is so refreshing, I can’t believe this, that someone actually cares and wants to talk with me and that begins the cementing process of trust. And if they have 10 other translation job requests in ours is number 11, we hope that they’ll take ours.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Absolutely. Duncan, you talked about this briefly earlier, but I want you to provide some additional details on this. I know that accuracy and correctness, completeness is of absolute, paramount importance here in clinical trial translations, but what are the implications of bad translation for clinical trials? What happens if an incorrect translation is submitted?

 

Duncan Shaw

There’s not a lot out there that you’ll find that talks about this, but I think inherently we know of some bad outcomes. I think at worst you could have potential patient fatalities in a clinical trial. You could have, yes, you could have minor or significant adverse effects suffered by a patient in a clinical trial. Uh, you could have a hundred million dollar clinical trials shut down by a breach of patient confidentiality or a mistranslation. You have to be so careful and judicious because the consequences are very severe, consequences going all the way back to non-disclosure agreements. And so I think there are numerous potential bad consequences, none of which any of us want, we don’t even enjoy talking about them, but I think it’s imperative that we acknowledge them. A trial could get shutdown, an arm of a trial could get shut down. A product launch for a biotechnology company that has been in the works for 10 years or longer could be cancelled. Like they say, Sultan, the pen is mightier than the sword. I think that the written word in translation can cause beautiful, wonderful openings and huge advances in life, as well as tremendous setbacks potentially.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I would like you to please talk to us about training and the importance of continuous improvement in the execution cycle. How do you handle that and what is the role and involvement of client, the LSP and the translation execution team, which in other words means the translators, editors and others?

 

Duncan Shaw

So that’s a great question. I think that we have to be lifelong learners in general. That’s a phrase that people toss around a lot. Internally, our staff have certain continuing education requirements that they must meet every year, and that entails life sciences learning about the industry and goings on that entails translation technology, translation memory tools. That entails grammatical diagnostic and quality checking tools. The question, fundamentally, is where is the individual right now in their growth process? Where are the shortcomings and what do we need to address? Where have there been problems potentially? What required excessive time? What we’re trying to avoid is a repeat of problems that can be avoided, and I think training and learning are critical in that nature. I always encourage anyone to just devote 30 minutes a day to trying to learn something new about language, about business, about your industry. So we have required number of hours for internal training purposes. And we encourage group discussions with our translators to talk about terminology approaches, style guide enhancements, shared collaboration and like I said earlier, we invite feedback from translators all over the world for their viewpoints, and we really want to listen and try to learn.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So zooming out, let’s talk about the current state of this specific niche market. Given the pandemic still lingering, you know, in some form of degree, the global economy is somewhat slowing down and so on. How does this fieldfare out compared to other industries in terms of its outlook?

 

Duncan Shaw

I feel that there is going to be continued growth in life sciences and clinical trials translations. It might slow down, it might dip a little bit. We’ve seen some decline in some markets. We’ve seen a little bit of decline in biotechnology markets that five years ago, seven, ten years ago, we’re much stronger and we’ve seen pop up growth in some other areas. So people are going to continue to seek advances in the drug discovery process. There’s going to always be pipeline needs, there’s going to always be clinical trial translation needs when we look at health sciences to begin with, but I think as a field is different than aerospace, financial services, it’s different than automotive. It’s different than sectors that have been particularly hit hard and clearly hit hard. I think there’s going to be a bubble of protection, Sultan, but I think in the short run there might be some slowdowns, and that’s something that we have to just be conscious of and to look ahead the crest of the hill and to talk to our clients and say what are you seeing from your clients? How is growth happening for you? What are hiring patterns anticipated for you? And sometimes that’s difficult to get because these guys pull their cards so close to the best.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Right. And would you say, Duncan, our industry or the translation localization field in general still has a lot of ground to cover with clinical trials? Are there areas that can be exploited further that haven’t been touched yet?

 

Duncan Shaw

The short answer is yes, there clearly are, and I think that’s happening more and more everyday. As you know with your own expertise in rare languages, Sultan, I think there’s a huge audience that is underrepresented when we look at languages used on the internet and the number of languages people talk about 7000 known languages and the number of languages that are becoming extinct, the number of prominent languages used in business in clinical trials where there’s money flow when we look at a macro picture, but I think that there are going to be opportunities in interpreting, I think there are going to be opportunities in multimedia localization will grow. The gurus have been talking about this for a number of years, as you know, and we’re seeing more and more of that. I think there are going to be opportunities for things like e-consent localization and decentralized clinical trials has become a movement that’s gaining steam.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Duncan, what are your thoughts on automation in this area? I mean as things are evolving with technology and digitization and so forth, do you think it is a better candidate than other industries such as legal or engineering? And how can we take advantage of automation for healthcare and clinical trial translation and in particular?

 

Duncan Shaw

Personally, I would peg automation as being on equal footing with engineering or other fields. We use certain tools and managing and overseeing projects orders we use, we’re a big believer in checklist and I think for highly repetitive types of tasks there are certain template steps, there are certain procedures that can be automated that save the project manager time and energy. I’ve heard people say that a project manager today was 10 project managers 10 years ago. I don’t know if the gap is quite that strident, but automation has clearly helped all of us look at how it affects all of us in our daily lives, and it has included DTS, our project managers do work with automation, but we also never want to lose the personal touch. If someone isn’t feeling personally heard, then again, that trust factor goes down and that’s what we don’t want to lose with automation. So you want to scale it properly and use it and not ignore automation, but not it’s not going to just be the predominant force in a translation order fifty, seventy percent. It never can be in my view.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In closing, Duncan, what is your message to our industry in general? What would you like to share with other LSP executives?

 

Duncan Shaw

You know why I might have a contrarian message here, but I’m going to say it anyway.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Go ahead.

 

Duncan Shaw

I would advise a lot of translation companies to raise their pricing. I think that all we hear about is we’re becoming a commoditized industry and the only way to stay in business. Is to lower your pricing, lower your pricing, lower pricing, yes, buyers are becoming more sophisticated in every field, you and I are becoming more sophisticated car buyers. It happens across, you know, every industry, but I feel that with a lowering of pricing, whether you’re a translator or whether you’re a translation agency, whether you’re a technology provider, I think that that hurts the performance and contribution for the end client. I really do. And I think that if you raise your pricing to a premium level, let’s be realistic here, we can’t charge $10,000, we can’t say well, this is worth a million dollars, so these documents surely must be worth $80,000 to try to localize, when in fact the market is going to quote tenth of that. We have to accept. That we’re going to be competing bids. I happen to think competition is good, but I wish more of our peers would raise their prices and value their services, vlue themselves because ultimately you’re going to be able to retain and attract a higher caliber staff. You’re going to make a better experience for your buyer. You’re going to be happier or happier when we’re growing. And that would be my message to everyone, including our ourselves.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So sustainability through pricing is what you’re aiming for, and with that I would like to say, Duncan, that it was an interesting and fun conversation. I actually really, really enjoyed it. I have a better idea about how translation and language services are used in a medical research, clinical research field. And with that, I want to thank you for your time and look forward to speaking with you again on a different topic soon.

 

Duncan Shaw

I really want to thank you, Sultan, for making this podcast available. I had a lot of fun today. Thank you so much.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Appreciate it!

 

Here we are, as usual, with my personal analysis of the subject, I think that life sciences in general, and clinical trials, in particular, will see continuous demand for translation and language services. While every LSP may claim that they can operate in this space, it is not easy, and as you heard from Duncan, it’s not even possible for certain lisps to meet the demands of this sector, given the risks. However, if you are prepared, or if you have already been in this space, you may want to focus on things such as data security, compliance with health regulations in North America and Europe, ensuring the use of qualified linguists, and using technology to automate repetitive and mundane work. I also believe that you need to have a strong passion for improving people’s lives through health care communications and that should reflect on everything you do.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode, and I hope you enjoyed it. Duncan is a very knowledgeable and experienced executive in our industry and his thoughts and ideas reflect the reality of the industry and the regulated content space. I hope you have been able to take a couple of action items and improve your business. As always, please let me know if you have any topic or guest ideas.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your platform of choice and give us a 5 star rating wherever you’re listening.

 

Until next time!

 

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