We must overcome the barriers that hinder patient engagement, including language, cultural differences, or system complexities.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General
The same medical term can appear in a safety report, a regulatory submission, a clinical record and a patient leaflet, often in more than one language.
This year’s World Patient Safety Day on 17 September was a timely reminder that patient safety depends on medical information being understood clearly and accurately. Once that information crosses borders, language becomes part of that safety challenge. The language may change, but the condition, treatment or adverse reaction being described cannot.
Medicine has spent decades creating systems to keep those concepts consistent. MedDRA, ICD-11 and SNOMED CT give regulators, researchers and healthcare professionals a shared clinical reference, so information recorded in one country can still be recognised and used in another.
The terminology, however, is only part of the job. A term that belongs naturally in an SmPC may need very different language around it in a patient leaflet, while a safety report has its own conventions again. Specialist medical translators work within those distinctions, preserving the medical meaning while making sure the language fits the document, the reader and the purpose it serves.
A Vocabulary Built to Travel
Medical terminology earns its value when the same concept can be recognised wherever the information travels
MedDRA is a clear example of how that works. Used across pharmaceutical regulation and drug safety, MedDRA gives organisations a shared terminology for recording and reporting medical events. Its multilingual versions are maintained together, allowing information recorded in one language to remain connected to the same clinical concept elsewhere. That makes it possible to compare safety data internationally without asking every country to describe medicine in exactly the same words.
MedDRA is only one part of a much larger international system of medical terminologies and classifications.
For example, Viral myocarditis in English, miocarditis vírica in Spanish and ウイルス性心筋炎 in Japanese are different terms for the same medical concept. MedDRA links each of them to that concept, allowing safety reports in different languages to be coded and analysed consistently.
WHO’s ICD-11 provides a common framework for classifying diseases and health conditions internationally. WHO describes it as “a common language that allows health professionals to share standardized information across the world.”
SNOMED CT works at a more detailed clinical level, linking the terms used in healthcare to the concepts and relationships behind them.
Their multilingual design is not an afterthought. SNOMED CT, for example, requires translation to begin with the medical concept rather than a literal substitution of words. A term must make sense within the clinical system in which it will actually be used.
The terminology provides the common reference point. Translation makes that reference point usable within another language and clinical setting.
From Terminology to Usable Medicine
An agreed term is only the beginning. Medical language still must work inside documents that serve very different purposes.
A pharmacovigilance term used to record an adverse reaction may later appear in an SmPC, a package leaflet or a piece of HCP communication. The underlying concept must remain consistent, but the wording around it may need to change considerably. Regulators need precision. Healthcare professionals need recognised clinical language. Patients need information they can understand and act on.
That is why medical translation cannot be reduced to matching one approved term with another. The translator has to know which parts of the language are fixed by convention, and which parts need to be shaped for the reader.
European product information makes this particularly clear. EMA’s QRD framework provides standard wording, structure and terminology for centrally authorised medicines. In the SmPC (Summary of Product Characteristics), adverse reactions are presented using established MedDRA terminology. At the same time, the package leaflet is being revised with greater emphasis on clarity and patient-friendliness.
Medical terminology provides the anchor, but the communication around it must adapt to the reader, the setting and the purpose without weakening the meaning it carries.
Good medical translation works within both demands. It preserves the recognised medical concept while giving it the right form for the document in front of the reader. That is what allows a shared international terminology to move beyond databases and regulatory frameworks and become useful medicine.
When Medical Language becomes Digital Infrastructure
Medical terminology is now doing another job. Increasingly, it has to work for the digital systems carrying it.
That change has already become visible in European medicines regulation. In September 2026, EMA published new guidance for translators working with electronic product information, or ePI. Instead of treating an SmPC or package leaflet simply as a finished document ePI places that authorised information within a semi-structured electronic format that can be processed and presented digitally. Translators work inside that structure while preserving the terminology and regulatory language required for each version.
The same principle is becoming more and more relevant as translation memories, terminology databases and AI-assisted tools enter medical communications. A well-managed termbase gives translation systems more than a record of previous wording by identifying preferred or approved terminology and making it available consistently across the workflow.
Technology can make multilingual medical content faster to manage and easier to reuse. Its value, however, grows considerably when it is built around the terminology that medicine has spent decades establishing. In that sense, the old work of agreeing the right medical words is becoming part of the infrastructure behind the newest tools.
Keeping the Meaning Intact
Global medicine works because its language has been built to travel.
Behind every multilingual clinical document, regulatory submission or patient resource sits a much larger framework of agreed terminology, specialist knowledge and careful translation. That framework allows medical information to move across borders without becoming detached from the science that gave it meaning in the first place.
As medicine becomes more digital, more international and more dependent on shared data, that linguistic infrastructure will only become more important. Terminology gives the system its reference points. Specialist translators turn those reference points into language that can be read, understood and used.
That is the language behind global medicine, and much of modern healthcare would struggle to move without it.
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