XML: A Translator’s Nightmare?

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, medical device manufacturers and contract research organisations, generally deal with vast amounts of information – many thousands of documents of varying size, ranging from ‘bits and pieces’ to large documents, and sometimes in all 23 languages of the EU, or even more. For larger organisations to survive, it is crucial to professionally manage this information. Content management systems (CMS) have come to play an important role in this respect and the benefits are obvious. Information in such systems is often stored as extensible markup language files (XML files). The product information management (PIM) system, developed by the European Medicines Agency (EMeA), requires registration documents to be submitted electronically, and in XML format. While there are certain advantages of using CMS systems, for writers and perhaps more so for translators, the work has not become easier. In general, medical translators have to deal increasingly with out-of-context fragments of information coming from a CMS, and translators who are involved in the translation of registration documents have to deal with the complexities of PIM.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT – THE GOOD NEWS

Until not too long ago a specific piece of information was usually available as a single electronic file. Even a relatively large document, for example an instruction manual for a medical device, consisted of perhaps a dozen different electronic files – one or two per chapter. With the introduction of document management systems (DMS) and content management systems (CMS), information can be centrally stored and retrieved. Also, the fact that the user of a CMS can store unique pieces of information that may occur several times and in different locations, in a database as individual text blocks and phrases, increases efficiency.