McElroy Translation Blog, Derek Savage
We all see the effects of globalization every day. Many of the products we see have been localized to our culture so well that you wouldn’t know where they were made without checking out the tag. The idea of globalization is so prevalent that you can hardly turn on PBS or NPR without hearing something on the topic. At McElroy, we see the effects of globalization on everything from drug labels to software engineering. I did some quick investigating specific to clinical trials and found a great article on Multicultural Issues in the Globalization of Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment.
To sum it up, global trials present a number of cross-cultural challenges including:
• Concern over accurate reporting of symptoms due to bio-psycho-socio-cultural perspectives
• Differences in governmental processes and regulatory requirements that affect submissions
• General language barriers and cultural differences affecting all forms of communication
• Difficulty in drawing valid scientific conclusions with data from ethnically and culturally diverse populations.
With more CRO’s move clinical trials into Africa, as was evident in 2009, finding the right resources for translating clinical trial protocols into languages like Zulu, Amharic, and Xhosa can be challenging. Finding the right language service provider to meet these challenges with the necessary experience and capabilities within the bioscience sectors are critical to the success of the trials.