Reviewing Italian medical translations: what a quality check should catch
In a multi-market healthcare project, the Italian translation is often delivered on time and looks fine at first glance. Then the client’s Italian affiliate or medical reviewer opens it and sends back a long list of changes, just days before the deadline.
An independent review by an Italian medical linguist, often called linguistic quality assurance (LQA) or in-country review, is the step that catches those problems before the client does. In this article I explain what a good review of Italian medical content should check, which errors come up most often, and how I report them so that agencies can act quickly.
What a review should check
Accuracy and completeness: nothing omitted, nothing added. Numbers, doses, units and percentages are checked one by one: a misplaced decimal or mg instead of µg is not a style issue.
Medical terminology: the terms an Italian doctor would actually use, applied consistently and in line with the client’s glossary and previously approved wording, including the standard statements used in regulated texts.
Regulatory-sensitive wording: absolute or misleading statements such as “completely safe” or “no side effects”, and therapeutic claims where they are not allowed, for example on food supplements.
Register and fluency: the text must read as if it had been written in Italian. Calques, unnecessary anglicisms and English sentence structure make even a correct translation sound foreign.
Italian conventions: decimal comma and full stop for thousands (1.000), day-month-year dates, Italian quotation marks and capitalisation rules: in Italian, headlines are not written in Title Case and months and weekdays are lower case.
In-context check: the final layout, where Italian text, often longer than the English source, can be truncated, badly hyphenated or broken across lines.
Typical errors in Italian medical translations
False friends: severe becomes grave, not severo; drug is farmaco, not droga.
Literal terminology: compliance in a therapeutic context is usually aderenza alla terapia.
Inconsistency: the same concept translated in three different ways in the same set of materials.
Tone: a promotional voice in content for patients, or an overly casual one in content for healthcare professionals.
Locale details: decimal points left in English format, English date order, missing accents on capital letters (È, not E’).
How I report my changes
A review is only useful if the agency can act on it quickly. That is why I deliver:
a review log listing each change with the original segment, the correction and a short rationale;
a category and a severity for each issue (for example accuracy, terminology, style, locale; critical, major, minor), so that the project manager can see at a glance what really matters;
a clear separation between errors and preferential changes, so that the translator receives useful feedback and not a list of personal tastes;
queries for the client when a decision is not linguistic but regulatory or strategic.
Why it matters for agencies
A structured Italian review means fewer review rounds with the client’s affiliate, fewer last-minute surprises on the final artwork and a quality process you can explain and defend. It also protects the relationship between the agency, its translators and the client.
Your Italian reviewer for healthcare content
As an Italian medical writer and medical copywriter, I review and proofread localised healthcare content for agencies and language service providers, combining scientific accuracy with attention to tone and readability.
Get in touch to tell me about your projects: I can review your Italian materials and fit into your existing workflow.
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