Generic translation agencies can handle the words. What they can't handle is the context — the methodological nuance in a survey instrument, the regulatory precision in a clinical document, or the patient-facing sensitivity in a healthcare communication. That's where OSI is different.

Our translators are selected for dual expertise: fluency in the target language and demonstrable knowledge of your industry. Every project is matched to a linguist who has worked in your specific domain — not a generalist assigned from a pool.

What We Translate

• Market research survey instruments (CAWI, CAPI, CATI)
• Discussion guides and qualitative research materials
• Clinical trial protocols and patient information leaflets
• Informed consent forms and regulatory submissions
• Pharmacovigilance and adverse event documentation
• Healthcare communications and patient-facing materials
• Scientific publications and medical literature
• Marketing materials for pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors

Our Translation Approach

Specialist Linguist Matching

Every project is allocated to linguists with verified expertise in your sector. We maintain detailed profiles on each translator in our network — including their academic background, industry experience, and subject matter specialisms.

Quality Assurance

All translations go through a minimum two-step process: subject-matter specialized translation, followed by review from a fully independent qualified linguist. For regulatory or clinical content, we apply additional validation steps including back-translation and reconciliation where required.

Terminology Management

We build and maintain project-specific glossaries and translation memories for all ongoing clients — ensuring consistency across waves, documents, and markets. This is especially critical for longitudinal research programmes and global regulatory submissions.

Typical Use Cases

Languages & Coverage

We cover 100+ languages across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. Our network includes native-speaker translators in markets including all major European languages, BRICS nations, and emerging research markets. Contact us for specific language availability.

When a translated survey is delivered as a plain Word document, your programming team has to manually transfer every question, every answer option, every routing instruction into your survey platform. This introduces errors, adds time, and creates a quality risk at the worst possible moment — just before fieldwork launches.

OSI's language overlay service eliminates this problem. We deliver translations in the precise structure your survey platform or scripting team requires — preserving all variable names, codes, routing logic, and display conditions exactly as they appear in the source.

What's Included

• Translation of all question text, response options, and instructions
• Preservation of all variable names, codes, and routing identifiers
• Cultural adaptation of response scales (e.g. agreement, satisfaction, frequency)
• Right-to-left language support (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu)
• Handling of special characters and diacritic marks
• Multi-wave consistency — we match terminology to previous waves automatically

Platform Compatibility

We work with all major survey platforms and scripting environments. Our delivery formats include native platform import files, structured Word/Excel overlays with coded columns, and platform-specific XML or JSON exports.

Why Market Research Teams Choose OSI for Overlays

Survey language overlay isn't just about translation — it's about understanding how surveys work. Our trained overlay teams are briefed on survey methodology so they understand how the translation in a Word document must be transmuted to the translation seen by an online respondent. This means navigating through programming code with unexpected logic changes, and real-time problem solving where different natural language grammatical structures must fit into programming written with one language in mind.

Even a perfectly translated survey can break when it goes live. Character encoding issues cause question text to appear as symbols. RTL language layouts fail on certain browsers. Routing logic that works in English breaks when translated text changes string lengths. Answer options that display correctly in the preview appear out of order to respondents.

Language link checking is the final quality gate before fieldwork opens. OSI assigns native-speaking in-country testers to review each live survey link in each target language — completing the survey from a respondent's perspective and logging every issue they encounter.

What We Check

• Character rendering and font display (diacritics, non-Latin scripts, special characters)
• Right-to-left layout and text alignment (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi)
• Survey routing and skip logic in the target language
• Scale and response option display (order, formatting, spacing)
• Open-ended text entry fields accepting target language input
• Progress bars, buttons, and navigation labels
• Mobile and tablet display in the target language
• Recording of responses (data captured correctly in the back-end)

Our Process

When Do You Need Link Checking?

Any online survey launching in a language other than the scripting language should be link-checked. It is especially critical for:

• Surveys in non-Latin script languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc.)
• Complex surveys with extensive routing, piping, or conditional logic
• Tracker studies where previous-wave data integrity is critical
• Healthcare and pharmaceutical surveys where data quality has regulatory implications
• High-volume fieldwork where errors would affect thousands of respondents before detection

Open-ended survey responses are where the real insights live. They're also where poor translation causes the most damage — turning nuanced, market-specific responses into bland, flattened summaries that lose the very detail your analysts need.

OSI's open ends service is built around one principle: preserve what the respondent actually said. Our translators work to maintain tone, register, and meaning — not just transfer words from one language to another. The result is verbatim data that analysts can work with directly.

Service Options

Quality Approach

Open ends are never processed by machine translation alone. Every response is handled by a human translator who has been briefed on the research context, the survey topic, and the analytical purpose. This context-awareness is what separates OSI from bulk translation services.

• Human translation — no unreviewed machine output
• Translator briefed on research topic and analytical context
• Consistent handling of ambiguous or colloquial language
• Flagging of responses requiring analyst attention (e.g. off-topic, incomplete)
• Delivery in Excel, CSV, or your analysis platform's native format

Adverse Events Checking

For pharmaceutical and healthcare market research, open-ended responses carry an additional obligation. When respondents discuss their experiences with treatments, medications, or healthcare, they may spontaneously disclose adverse events — and under BHBIA and EPhMRA guidelines, these disclosures must be identified and reported.

OSI offers Adverse Events Checking as an integrated add-on to the open ends service. Rather than sending your translated responses to a separate team for review, we can perform the AE check as part of the same workflow — with linguists who already have the research context. Any identified adverse events are flagged in a structured report and returned alongside your translated data, ready for handover to your pharmacovigilance or medical affairs team.

Volume & Turnaround

We handle everything from small surveys (50–100 responses) to large-scale quantitative projects with tens of thousands of open-ended responses across multiple markets. Contact us for volume pricing and turnaround estimates.

Running qualitative research in multiple markets isn't just a translation challenge — it's a human one. You need people who can build rapport, probe intelligently, and follow your discussion guide in ways that generate genuine insight. That requires both linguistic ability and research methodology experience. It's a rare combination. OSI has built a network of exactly these people.

Moderation Services

• In-depth interviews (IDIs) — telephone, video, and face-to-face
• Focus groups — in-facility and online
• Online communities and bulletin board studies
• Dyads and triads
• Expert interviews and KOL discussions
• Patient and HCP research in healthcare and pharma contexts

Interpretation Services

When you want to keep your own moderator but need language access, OSI provides experienced research interpreters who deliver:

• Simultaneous interpretation
• Consecutive interpretation (in-session, turn-by-turn)
• Telephone and video interpretation for remote sessions

How We Brief Our Moderators

Every moderator receives a thorough briefing that includes: the research objectives, target respondent profile, discussion guide walkthrough, any sensitive topic areas, and the client's preferred probing style. For healthcare and pharmaceutical research, we include relevant therapeutic area or product context. We don't just hand over a discussion guide and hope for the best.

Markets Covered

We have established moderator and interpreter networks across Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. If you have a market in mind, ask us — we can usually source the right person within 24–48 hours.

Getting qualitative sessions transcribed accurately — when recordings feature multiple speakers, technical terminology, accents, and sometimes background noise — is genuinely difficult. Getting them transcribed in a non-English language, and then translated into English for analysis, requires a specialist partner who understands both the research context and the linguistic demands.

OSI's transcription service is built specifically for market research. We transcribe focus groups, IDIs, online communities, ethnographies, and expert interviews — in the target language and translated into English if required — to a standard that analysts can work with directly.

Transcription Services

• Verbatim transcription — including ums, ahs, false starts, and interruptions
• Intelligent verbatim — cleaned for readability, removing fillers while preserving meaning
• Annotated transcription — with speaker IDs, timestamps, and non-verbal notations
• Multilingual transcription — transcribed in the source language
• Transcript translation — English translation of foreign-language transcripts
• Dual-column format — original language alongside English translation

Subtitling Services

For qualitative video content — recruitment videos, session recordings, stimulus materials, or highlight reels — OSI provides professional subtitling that is accurate, timed correctly, and formatted for your intended platform.

• Subtitle creation in any language
• Translation subtitles (foreign-language video with English subs)
• Closed captions (CC) for accessibility
• SRT, VTT, and other subtitle format outputs
• Embedded subtitles in video file on request

Quality Standards

All transcripts are further reviewed with a particular emphasis on correct medical terminology and product names. For foreign-language transcripts that are also translated, the translator works from the original audio — not just the transcript — to ensure no nuance is lost in the two-step process.

When pharmaceutical and healthcare companies conduct market research — whether through surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, or online communities — participants may spontaneously disclose adverse events. Under BHBIA and EPhMRA guidelines, and broader pharmacovigilance obligations, these disclosures must be identified, documented, and reported within defined timeframes.

The challenge is compounded when research is conducted across multiple languages. An adverse event disclosure made in German, Mandarin, or Portuguese must be identified with the same rigour as one made in English — which requires specialist linguists who understand both the language and the clinical significance of what is being said.

What We Check

• Open-ended and verbatim survey responses across all languages
• Qualitative interview transcripts and audio or video recordings
• Focus group transcripts and online research community posts
• Patient diary entries and observational research outputs
• Translated materials — checking for AE terminology accuracy and completeness

Our Approach

Guideline-Compliant Review

Our adverse events checking service is conducted in accordance with BHBIA and EPhMRA guidelines for the conduct of pharmaceutical market research. We apply the four-criteria framework for AE identification — an identifiable patient, an identifiable reporter, a suspect product, and an adverse event — to every piece of content we review.

Multilingual Coverage

We review research outputs in their original language, rather than relying on translated summaries. This ensures that nuance, ambiguity, and implicit AE disclosures are not lost before checking begins. Our linguists are native speakers with subject-matter knowledge of pharmaceutical and clinical terminology in their target language.

Audio and Recording Review

For qualitative research conducted via interview or focus group, we offer direct review of audio and video recordings — identifying AE disclosures that may not be captured in a transcript, or where tone and context are relevant to the assessment. This is particularly valuable where verbatim transcription has not been commissioned.

Structured Reporting

All identified adverse events are documented in a structured report, including source material reference, verbatim disclosure, language of origin, and our four-criteria assessment. Reports are formatted for straightforward handover to your pharmacovigilance, medical affairs, or project management team.

Typical Use Cases

Compliance Framework

Our service is designed to support compliance with the following guidelines and obligations:

• BHBIA Guidelines — Legal and Ethical Framework for Healthcare Market Research
• EPhMRA Code of Conduct — Adverse event reporting requirements for pharmaceutical market research
• ICH E2A — Clinical safety data management: definitions and standards for expedited reporting
• GVP Module VI — EMA guideline on management and reporting of adverse reactions

Translation alone is not sufficient for clinical outcome assessments. A PRO instrument that has been linguistically validated has gone through a structured, documented process to ensure it is not just accurately translated, but conceptually equivalent, culturally appropriate, and capable of measuring what it was designed to measure in the target population.

Regulatory agencies — including the FDA and EMA — require evidence of linguistic validation for COAs used in support of labelling claims and regulatory submissions. ISPOR task force recommendations provide the methodological framework that sponsors, CROs, and outcomes research teams rely on to meet this standard.

Instruments We Validate

We provide Linguistic Validation services across all categories of Clinical Outcome Assessment:

• PROs (Patient-Reported Outcomes) — symptom diaries, HRQoL measures, functional assessments, and satisfaction instruments completed directly by patients
• ClinROs (Clinician-Reported Outcomes) — clinician-administered rating scales and clinical assessment tools
• ObsROs (Observer-Reported Outcomes) — instruments completed by caregivers or observers on behalf of patients unable to self-report
• PerfOs (Performance Outcomes) — standardised task-based assessments of physical or cognitive function
• Mixed-source instruments — composite COAs drawing on patient, clinician, and observer input

Our Linguistic Validation Process

Stage 1: Forward Translation

Two independent translators — each a native speaker of the target language with relevant clinical or patient-experience expertise — produce separate forward translations of the source instrument. Translators work independently to preserve differences in interpretation that inform the reconciliation stage.

Stage 2: Reconciliation

A reconciliation meeting brings together the two forward translations under the guidance of an experienced project manager. Discrepancies are reviewed, discussed, and resolved to produce a single reconciled translation. All decisions are documented with rationale for the audit trail.

Stage 3: Back-Translation

An independent translator — native speaker of the source language with no prior exposure to the original instrument — translates the reconciled version back into the source language. The back-translation is reviewed against the original to identify any conceptual shifts or inaccuracies introduced during forward translation.

Stage 4: Harmonisation Review

Where validated versions of the instrument exist in other languages, we conduct a cross-language harmonisation review to ensure consistency in approach and terminology across the language portfolio. This is particularly important for instruments deployed in multi-country clinical trials.

Stage 5: Cognitive Debriefing

The reconciled translation is tested with a sample of target-population participants — typically patients, caregivers, or clinicians — through structured cognitive debriefing interviews. Participants are asked to describe their understanding of each item in their own words, identifying any that are unclear, ambiguous, or culturally inappropriate. Findings are documented and fed back into a final review.

Stage 6: Expert Review and Finalisation

Clinical and linguistic experts review the instrument in light of cognitive debriefing findings, approving final wording and documenting any amendments. The validated instrument is finalised with a complete methodology report covering all stages, decisions, and participant data.

Therapeutic Areas

Our Linguistic Validation experience spans a broad range of therapeutic areas and instrument types:

Standards We Follow

• FDA PRO Guidance (2009) — Patient-Reported Outcome Measures: Use in Medical Product Development to Support Labelling Claims
• EMA Reflection Paper on COAs — Methodological framework for the use of patient-reported outcome measures in regulatory submissions
• ISPOR Task Force Recommendations — Principles of Good Practice for the Translation and Cultural Adaptation Process for PRO Measures
• ICH E6 (GCP) — Good Clinical Practice guidelines governing instrument use in clinical trials