This guide provides practical support for translating health information. It offers tips on overcoming key challenges and links to useful resources. While it is mainly focused on foreign language translation, the principles can also be applied to British Sign Language and Braille.
In the UK, up to 1 million people cannot speak English well or at all[1]. These people have a lower proportion of ‘good’ health than English speakers[2]. Providing culturally appropriate translated health information can help people self manage and take part in shared decision making. Translation is consistently raised as a key challenge by health information producers.
The focus of this guide is translation of the written word. When using professional translation services, ‘translation’ will normally be used for the written word and ‘interpreting’ for the spoken word. Subtitles and voiceovers are known as ‘audiovisual translation’.
This guide supports the following PIF TICK criteria:
6.0 Health inequalities: Information is written to meet health and digital literacy, language and accessibility needs of the target audience.
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