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Your company is expanding to foreign markets and you've been chosen to oversee the localization of your company's web site. You built the web site and you know all about it: every page, each navigation button; scripting, coding, applets, cascading style sheets, etc. But you don't have a clue about the translation pr

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

ocess.

At this point, you are doing some research about translation and localization and may seek some guidance. You need a plan - identifying possible challenges and implementing the most cost-effective processes.

Here are some tips that can help with your ; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

ces/websitetranslation.html">website translation:

1. Do not translate your web site only because everybody is doing it. Carefully evaluate your business needs and establish performance indicators to measure your success (or lack thereof). Most managers these days demand return investment on all marketing activi

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

ies. It will be to your advantage to be able to show bottom line improvements (i.e. online sales in Germany increased 20% or support calls dropped by 10% after we launched the German web site).

2. Identify which section of the web site needs to be translated and define a handoff process to your translation vendor.

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

Some of the web pages are simple HTML files which can be easily opened and translated. But with anything non-HTML, the text often has to be extracted. This category includes all the graphics that contain text, Flash files, and PDF files.

3. Try to provide your translator with all of the source files from the very b

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

ginning (such as cost estimating). Do not copy and paste every page of your web site in a Word file. It is not necessary and can be time consuming. Even though your translator can download all the files from your web site, it is still a much better practice to hand over all the files relating to the web site. Word c

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

unt and cost estimates can be very inaccurate if the translator doesn't have all of the files to work with. Actually, if you have a dynamic web site, the word counting could be off by a long shot because of the unnecessary repetitions.

4. Make sure that your translator uses a translation memory (TM) tool. A TM too

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

l keeps all the translated material in a database and makes it available for any future updates. Using a TM tool can help you save money, improve consistency, and speed up turnaround. In addition, working within a TM tool, tags and script code are recognized and protected during content translation. Provide your tr

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

nslator with any available reference material such as translation guidelines, previous translations and glossaries. The guidelines can address issues such as what terms should be left in English, punctuation, adaptation of date/time format, addresses, symbols, and measurement systems. A glossary is a multilingual te

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

minology list that defines how abbreviations, product names, or industry specific terms should be translated. If the translator is using a translation memory tool, these glossaries can be imported to ensure consistency.

5. Provide your translation vendor with original graphic files including navigation buttons, Fla

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

h objects, textual graphics, and PDF files. These will have to be localized as well. It's in your best interest to send the native PhotoShop and Illustrator files that were used to create the GIFs and JPEGs on your web site! Also, some languages such as French and Spanish are often longer than English. So, you shoul

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

d keep this text expansion in mind when you create your initial graphics to allow for longer text. The desktop publishing specialist at your localization company will keep the background image and will reconstruct the layers containing text and merge them to make the target language images for web.

6. Do some testi

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

g after the initial localization is done to make sure that the site looks good and works properly. Check the visuals first. Then do some functionality testing (such as creating and filling out a test form) to see if any function was lost during the translation process. Check to make sure that all necessary pages hav

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

been uploaded and translated, all the links are working, and that the translated text can be viewed properly (your developer should change the character encoding according to the target language).

In addition, you should perform testing to ensure that your web site works well on different platforms, operating syst

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

ems and browsers at this phase. Make sure that the translator or agency understands how browsers work with special characters (diacritics). If your localizer is working or making revisions on the translated text in HTML mode, be careful to never enter characters with accents into the code itself. Certain browsers c

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

uld display the web page incorrectly.

7. Some translators will try to differentiate the localized files from the source files by adding a distinguishing extension for each language (the French file for home.html will be named home_fr.html). When this happens, every link reference in every file will need to be renam

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

d to point to the right link. This will be time consuming and it will increase the possibility of creating errors. Instead of doing this, it is better to store each language version in its own folder.

8. Almost every target language requires localization of measurement systems, date format, punctuation, the thousan

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

ds/decimal system, and colours. Everyone involved in the localization process should have cultural sensitivity to avoid offensive content.

9. Pay attention to web site layout when localizing in a language like Arabic or Hebrew. Because these are right to left languages, it is most likely necessary to redesign the l

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

yout (especially when your web site has navigation bars on the left).

10. If you want to optimize your multilingual site you should be aware that not all major search engines are working properly with foreign pages and your web site may not be listed in many of them. Also, the terminology your translators prefer (h

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

wever correct or appropriate) might be VERY different from what your customers are using to find you. You must understand how your customers search online to effectively achieve high rankings and good online results. You should do research on what the major local search engines are and what your competition is doing

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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