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1.1    Purpose and scope of this document

The present guidelines are based on the SNOMED International Editorial Guide (http://snomed.org/eg) and are intended for translators of SNOMED CT. They have been developed by the members of the Translation User Group and summarise the main editorial principles of SNOMED International. They can be used as a starting point for the development of national guidelines for the translation of SNOMED CT from English into the national languages of the SNOMED CT member countries. Additional information on editorial rules can be found in the Confluence editorial templates (https://confluence.ihtsdotools.org/display/SCTEMPLATES/SCT+Modeling+Templates+and+description+patterns).

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The present document also contains general recommendations on the steps involved in a translation workflow process, as well as information on source documents and references that are useful during translation.

1.1.1    Assessment of translation quality

Translation project owners (TPOs) should ensure that translations comply with the principles on which SNOMED CT was originally based: understandability, reproducibility and usefulness (URU). Understandable means that the meaning of a concept can be understood by most healthcare providers without reference to private or inaccessible information; reproducible means that several users apply the concept to the same situations; useful means that the concept has a practical value for the users that is self-evident or can be easily explained. Furthermore, the information contained in the translated concepts must be semantically equivalent to the information contained in the core source terminology (International Release). SNOMED International has developed a document that describes how to assess the quality of the translation and the degree of consistency. The document entitled A methodology and toolkit for evaluating SNOMED CT translation quality (2012) outlines and defines a set of requirements or “quality characteristics” (QCs) and related metrics.

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It is recommended that TPOs refer to Annex A of the current document and to the Methodology and Toolkit document to ensure that they include all quality metrics identified as mandatory for use in their project and quality plans. Metrics for measuring translation quality can be reformulated as contractual clauses in formal agreements between a TPO and a Translation Service Provider (TSP) on the services to be provided and the level of service.

1.1.2    Change requests

1.2    Target group

The target group of this document are all persons directly involved in the translation of SNOMED CT into another language, i.e. translators, reviewers, domain experts, validators as well as managers and members of an editorial board or equivalent group of experts who define the linguistic and terminological guidelines for the specific translation of the target language.