Translation For Medical, Marketing, Surveys, Testing, Databases & More

09/01/2010 04:23 PM

The DEA’s decision to recruit speakers of Ebonics―or African American Vernacular English (AAVE)―to listen in on wiretaps made for a brief brouhaha in the media a few days ago. But criticism focused mainly on the term Ebonics, which seems to be a trigger word for some of the racial divisions that dog American society.  No one objected much to the basic premise, which is the need for specialists to help cops understand perp-speak. See my previous post and the ensuing comments here. But it got me thinking. We do our share of wiretap translation in other languages, and have found that people engaged in professional criminal enterprises prefer not to be understood by the law or other eavesdroppers. On more than one occasion, we’ve run into a wall when we’ve run up against an argot. [...]

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08/30/2010 03:54 PM

A law intended to speed up the development of new pediatric drugs in the US has ended up pushing many trials to the children of developing and undeveloped nations worldwide, reveals a study published in Pediatrics. “The trend that we describe brings up some scientific and ethical problems,” says Dr. Sara Pasquali, a pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center and lead author of the study in an interview with Reuters. The Pediatric Exclusivity Provision passed by Congress in 1997 provides six months of patent exclusivity to pharmaceutical companies to conduct safety and efficacy studies of drugs in children. This program has resulted in more than 150 drug label changes for children’s medications, and led to an estimated $14 billion in profits to pharmaceutical companies. This ramp-up has also had the effect of globalizing US pediatric clinical trials. [...]

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