You may know this as patent translation, life sciences or pharmacovigilance translation, terminology work, subject-matter-expert translation, or certified translation.
What it is
Translation written from source by a specialist in that subject and that language pair. Not a corrected machine draft. For some content that is the only defensible way to produce it, and we would rather say which content than imply it is all of it.
When it is the right answer
Where the machine demonstrably loses. In the hardest independent evaluation run in 2025 — thirty language pairs, sixty systems, professional annotators marking real errors — a professional human translation beat every machine system tested into Japanese, Icelandic, Estonian and Egyptian Arabic. English to Egyptian Arabic and English to Italian were named the two most challenging pairs in the whole evaluation. Those results are public and we will show you the source.
Where being wrong is expensive. Regulated content, prescribed phrases that must be reproduced exactly rather than translated, contractual language, anything where fluent and wrong is worse than obviously wrong.
Where post-editing does not actually save anything. The largest study of post-editing speed ever run — 90 million words, 879 linguists, 11 language pairs — found post-editing into Swedish 7% slower than translating from scratch, and for Polish 18% faster on average while being slower in 89% of individual jobs. In pairs and content types where that holds, translating properly is both better and cheaper, and we will tell you when we think you are in one.
Where a segment cannot be salvaged. Inside an Exception Review job, a flagged segment the machine got badly wrong comes back retranslated rather than patched. Same discipline, one segment at a time.
What you get
A named translator with recorded qualifications in the subject, not an anonymous resource from a pool. Where you need it: independent second-linguist review, and a certificate of accuracy as a named deliverable.
How we price it
Per word or per hour, depending on the content. No post-editing discount applies, because there is no machine draft being edited.
Which languages, and which subjects
We commit language by language rather than advertising a number, and we staff by cell rather than by language: patent Japanese, pharmacovigilance German, medical device Korean. Ask about the cell you need to fill and we will tell you who we have, what they are qualified in, in what timeframe, and where we would rather you used someone else.
Delivered, or staffed
Send us the work and we return the deliverable described above. Or place our reviewers into your own process and tooling and run them under your rubric, your schema and your brand. Same people, same qualification records, different contract. Tell us which you want and we will price it that way.
Need the evidence as part of the deliverable? See documentation and evidence.