The quality of medical translations should be the highest objective for both customers and localization vendors. However, from time to time, it is inevitable that a misalignment of quality expectations may occur during localization. When this happens, the localization vendor must work as a partner with the customer to take this feedback seriously and increase communication to uncover the root cause for the issue.

The key to a strong partnership between customers and vendors is to have a discussion about quality, style and in-country review objectives at the start of the project lifecycle to ensure the vendor clearly understands the customer's expectations. There are several ways to achieve this: arranging for a meeting with in-country reviewers and linguists at the project start, scheduling a glossary review to get feedback on terminology and providing materials to the linguists with context, style and terminology references.

Following these steps will usually ensure expectations are met, but it is possible that a gap may still exist. When this happens, the vendor should be flexible and consider changing the process to meet the customer’s expectations. Changing the process to move the in-country review cycle from the end of the project to after the translation and edit phase was a successful solution for one client. This allowed the reviewers to provide feedback earlier and minimized the need to re-do a lot of work toward the end of the project.

While quality issues should be avoided at all costs, they give the vendor the opportunity to improve communication with the customer, to move quickly to resolve the issue and to improve internal processes to ensure the issue will not surface again.