Page History

...

SNOMED CT translation is an interdisciplinary collaboration which requires careful attention to content, structure and clinical relevance. These factors are of foremost importance in order to ensure the usability of the terminology in connection with implementation in electronic health record systems. Both linguistic and semantic quality must be assured.

The core SNOMED CT is not perfect and its structure and content continue to evolve. These facts call for vigilance on the part of the translation team members who need to review and analyses the relationships of each concept in order to elucidate the meaning of a term within the terminological context. Looking at the preferred term in English is not sufficient to enable accurate concept-based translation.

...

It is crucial that those involved in the translation, verification, validation, and approval processes are familiar with the terminological principles on which SNOMED CT is based. It is equally important that they comply with SNOMED International Style Guides Editorial Guide and that they are conscious of issues such as the choice of lexical variant, term requirements, translation techniques, and the importance of ensuring linguistic consistency.

Additionally, it is important that those involved in the translation process are aware that sometimes, their inability to understand a given term or concept may be caused not by their own lack on insight, but actually by a mistake or an ambiguity in the core terminology (international release) that needs to be corrected. SNOMED CT undergoes constant improvement, mistakes corrections are correctedmade, and ambiguities are addressed. To ensure this constant enhancement of SNOMED CT, any translation team should register questions, comments or suggestions and forward these to SNOMED International in order to avoid spending extra time on unsolvable issues and at the same time contribute to discovering any mistakes and ambiguitiesimprovement of the terminology. Currently, questions and remarks from the translation teams are dealt with by the SNOMED International request submission process.

...