About Advocating Global
A blog designed to support globally minded communication professionals with insight into the global communication strategies that lead to desired behavior and positive end-user outcomes. We write and invite experts to write in about global communication topics in healthcare, corporate communications and marketing, as well as best practices in localization and process management.
Our topics may vary, but our focus is always on the advocacy for the communications professional; to empower them with the tools and best practices to be a global leader and make a difference in the outcomes of the end-user.
Healthcare Communications Blog
Our Healthcare Communications Blog is intended for healthcare professionals, employee benefit managers and pharmaceutical marketing professionals to get a better understanding of the role that translation plays in the healthcare industry. We work in fields of Managed Care, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Clinical Trials (Surveys), Open Enrollment and Employee Benefit Communications in the United States. While we focus a lot on hot topics like Spanish translations and the Hispanic population, there is also an increasing pressure to provide patient, member or employee communications in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and other emerging languages. This puts the pressure on healthcare communication managers to be proficient in understanding how to deal with translation, localization and culture in the healthcare translations field.
With this blog, we intend to make every manager in the healthcare industry a little more globally minded and therefore, a better advocate for the foreign language end user
Translating health claims on packaging
There are two facets to properly translating health claims on packaging: legal and linguistic. If you’ve gone to market in the US with a health claim on your product package, you’re already well aware of relevant regulations and may already be working with in-country...
What are healthcare translation services?
The answer to that question may seem like a simple one, but whether you’re new to healthcare translation or have been involved in this industry for a while, answering that question can take us in myriad directions. Our aim here is to provide a general overview for...
Translations about HIV: awareness and pharma marketing
If Language Solutions did a “Wrapped,” à la Spotify, it would show that 38 of our projects in 2022 were translations about HIV. These included 2 global conferences (AIDS 2022 in Montreal and Fast-Track Cities 2022 in Seville), more than 77,500 words translated between...
Strategies for translation of value formularies
Translation of value formularies and preferred drug lists may not be as straightforward as it seems. The formularies we translate most often have six components: Headings (examples: Drug Name, Tier) Classifications or groups (examples: antifungals, NSAIDs, proton pump...
Cultural awareness in healthcare
Cultural awareness in healthcare is the ability to perceive our own cultural beliefs, values, and customs, and to understand how they shape our decisions and behavior. All cultures have developed systems of beliefs to explain the cause of illness, how illness can be...
Use of the term Latinx in healthcare marketing
If you type “use of the term Latinx in healthcare marketing” into Google, the first non-sponsored result is tellingly entitled “Latinx – to use or not to use?” If you click on that title, you find a blog post from market intelligence agency Mintel. But if you’re...
Health Translations in different languages
For organizations seeking health translations in different languages, there are a variety of resources available which we will list below. These are general patient education handouts in different languages on a variety of subjects, videos and more. By providing...
How to make PDFs WCAG compliant: Getting started
Learning how to make PDFs WCAG compliant can feel daunting, and it certainly needs to be approached with thought and care. Once you are aware of the intent behind WCAG and how they function in a PDF, ensuring the accessibility of digital PDFs can become second nature....
Getting Certified Translation Services
If you’re looking for certified translation services, you may be surprised by what that actually entails. Some translators are certified by bodies such as the American Translators’ Association (ATA), but that doesn’t mean that every translation they produce is...
African language translation and Hep B
Hepatitis B is a silent epidemic in the West African community and using African language translation for education of the community in the U.S. can help with the World Health Organization's (WHO) goal of eliminating viral hepatitis - hep B and C - as a major public...