A distributor in another country opens the English product page for a plate system. The implant's name is right, and so is the description. They click the brochure and the Spanish version downloads. They go back to the listing, filter by anatomical region, and the product doesn't appear, because in English it was never assigned that category. They try the language switcher from another product and end up on the page for a different product in the same family.
Each piece of copy, read on its own, had been translated. The relationships hadn't.
What needs to be translated besides the text
In a medical device catalog, a product page is connected to several things: its categories by anatomical region and procedure, its brand, its documents, its related products, and the courses and videos it appears in. On a bilingual website, each of those connections exists twice, and each one can break in just one language.
Some fields get translated and some have to stay identical: the product code, the registered trade name, the acronym the surgeon uses in both languages. That decision is made by field type, before translation starts. If it's left to the translator, the same implant ends up with two names.
Documents have their own problem. Sometimes the English brochure doesn't exist yet. The English product page has to say what language the material it offers is in, instead of serving the Spanish PDF without warning or linking to the one for another product in the same family.
Site search and filters have a language too
An English product page can be perfect and never show up, because the filter that would return it in Spanish has no equivalent set up in English. The same thing happens with a new product: it's entered in both languages, but someone assigns its categories in only one.
The only way to see it is to go through the site as a visitor would, in each language: come in through an anatomical region, filter by product type, open the product page, search by code, and switch languages from there. And to do it without an admin session, because the cache and the language saved in the browser change what's displayed.
At SAI, the site ended up with 643 URLs with complete hreflang: each page knows its equivalent in the other language, and the language switcher leads to the same product page.
Medical validation sets the schedule
Translating a medical website involves a step that a website in another industry doesn't: someone with clinical training has to read the technical content in the second language and confirm it says what it's supposed to say. At a medical device company, those people are usually practicing surgeons, who validate between surgeries.
At SAI, there were hundreds of URLs of technical content in English for medical professionals to validate. The site had already been built; what set the pace was that review. To keep it moving, the translation was done inside the site itself, with a dedicated translator working directly on the pages, after explaining why the content couldn't be exported to a text document to be reviewed outside the site: outside the page, the very relationships that need checking are lost.
It's worth stating that volume as a number from day one. “The English needs reviewing” sounds like a one-week task. “Several hundred technical pages that a physician has to read” gets planned differently: the minimum needed to publish is defined, pages are ranked by priority, and what a physician validates is separated from what the translator can review on her own.
Review on the page
Comments are made on the product page the visitor will see, rather than in a spreadsheet. Each page is entered as a draft and reviewed in preview, in both languages. That's where the problems surface: the title of a technique guide that doesn't fit on the card in English, the category that returns no products, and the download button that still carries the previous file's name.
When a new product comes in, the same review is repeated: both versions, the categories in each language, the right document for each one, and a search by code while logged out.
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