The Customer:
An American translation company, whose own customer is an American publisher – a major developer and producer of databases of periodical and reference literature.

The Task:
Translation of medical articles of a popular scientific nature. The articles are intended for America’s Russian-speaking population and must be written in simple, easy-to-read form, comprehensible to persons with a high-school education, yet preserving all the particularities of the medical text. Hence, the translators and editors are faced with the task not only of translating the articles, but also of adapting the complicated medical concepts they contained, making them understandable to the average layman, who is hardly a medical specialist. A simple task, it would seem.  However, not every specialist in his field is capable of describing complex examples in popular terms, explaining specific terms and concepts in popular language.

The challenges of the project therefore include:
The necessity of selecting workers who are superb specialists in the field of medical translation, and capable of performing the challenging task of making complicated material easy and interesting to grasp without compromising the meaning, and preserving the flow of thought. 
The mandatory use of professional translation software – the work had to be executed only in TagEditor, an application of the Trados translation program. A fairly standard requirement, but for one thing: not all the translators with a professional medical education who were selected for work on the project were skilled in the use of the software. 
A conservative approach to the use of specialized translation software on the part of certain medical specialists involved in the work.

Our solutions:
1. We succeeded in selecting workers who were both superb translators in the medical sphere and simultaneously capable of performing popular adaptation and creative elaboration of highly-specialized texts. 
2. We were able to interest our staff in learning new technologies and working at a new level of technical advancement. Trainings were rapidly arranged for the translators, which enabled them to begin work without any serious loss of time. 
3. Several editors were found who provided freelance editing services and provided feedback to the translators, relaying to them all their requirements and ensuring project-wide uniformity of terminology.

The project was completed on time, and the customer noted that our specialists displayed not only professional skill, but also good linguistic sense.