Transcreation in Clinical Research: How to Use Transcreation and Localization to Resonate with Your Audience
Clinical teams need to communicate with multilingual audiences across the globe while also meeting strict regulatory requirements. In addition to helping teams remain compliant, accurate translations ensure the highest standards of patient safety are met across clinical documentation and workflows while also reducing costs, errors, and inefficiencies. However, when translated directly into a new language, idioms and cultural phrases may not make sense or, at worst, be seen as offensive.
How can teams accurately resonate and build trust with diverse patient audiences? That’s where localization comes into play.
Localization (which is used interchangeably with transcreation) and translation are not one and the same. The translation process involves directly converting text from one language into another, word for word, preserving the meaning of the source material. Its main goals involve linguistic accuracy and effective communication. On the other hand, transcreation goes beyond translating by adapting content while considering the cultural nuances, social factors, and political sensitivities of the target audience. While a complex and time-consuming process, localization is instrumental to expanding trials globally, standing out from the competition, and truly achieving success in new markets.
With a better understanding of transcreation/localization, let’s dive into immediate key use cases to support clinical teams in resonating with their target patient audiences.
Patient Recruitment
There’s no question that patient recruitment is essential to overall clinical study success. By recruiting diverse participants from across the globe, teams can uncover insights into rare diseases and niche health communities to reach new life-improving treatment conclusions.
As a first step, clinical teams need to perform pre-campaign research to truly understand the audiences they’re recruiting, their interests, their location, and any related parameters. Through AI-powered machine workflows with expert human linguists and medical writers for post-editing, patient-facing recruitment materials such as brochures, advertisements, and patient information leaflets can be automatically localized. With culturally appropriate messaging, teams provide personalized experiences to global audiences in their preferred languages across all channels, increasing recruitment efforts and building trust from the start.
Clinical Trial Documentation and Patient Retention
With clinical trials operating globally, some study locations feature multiple regions, languages, and cultural contexts even within the same country, prompting the need for localization.
Beyond recruitment, transcreation strategies must be ongoing to uphold the highest patient safety standards for compliance and to increase retention. Because of this, patient-facing documentation during the trial such as informed consent forms (ICF), lay summaries, study brochures and flyers, and newsletters sharing progress must be localized and customized based on patient profiles. Clinical teams can also utilize multilingual call center support and localized chatbots to keep patients informed of the study and respond to their questions in real time.
Patient-Reported Outcomes and Clinical Outcome Assessments
In recent years, patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measures and clinical outcome assessments (COA) have centered patient voices by gathering subjective and direct accounts of the patients’ experiences throughout the study. By leveraging transcreation, clinical teams can bridge communication gaps in settings where the patient may not speak the trial’s source language. When performed with the language and cultural nuances of the patient audience in mind, clinical outcome assessments can give patients a sense of ownership and control over their involvement in the study, thereby increasing retention and engagement.
Conclusion
To truly value patients’ voices and experiences in clinical trials, life sciences organizations need to prioritize transcreation in their messaging.
If you’d like to learn more about how localization and transcreation services can help your team expand globally and resonate with new audiences, contact us today.