What would a translation error cost your business? If you operate in a regulated industry, mistakes can be costly—and not just in financial terms. They could impact individuals, society, or the environment, creating legal and ethical risks and damaging your reputation.
Rubric helps you manage the risks associated with translating regulated content, so you can scale safely. Our language expertise and market insight protect your brand, while our efficient, scalable processes expand your reach without going over budget.
What is regulated content?
Regulated content is material that is subject to:
- Legal and regulatory scrutiny
- Mandatory approvals and audit trails
- Strict terminology, labelling, or claims requirements
Examples include product labels, legal contracts, financial content, clinical trial documentation, and certain marketing content.
Many of our clients work in regulated industries, from food, pharma, and manufacturing to the legal, financial, and public sectors. Compliance requirements vary by industry as well as by region. Regulatory bodies—such as the EU, FDA, or ISO—enforce standards and require translated content to be accurate, consistent, and unambiguous.
Managing risk in your regulated content
Even in tightly regulated industries, not all communications carry the same level of risk. We help you risk-assess your content and guide you to an appropriate translation strategy.
- High risk: Every word matters, and any slip-ups could have significant consequences or cause a regulatory breach. Examples include legal, regulatory, or safety documentation.
- Medium risk: Accurate, consistent terminology is essential, but style less so. Examples include technical documentation or training material.
- Low risk: The message just needs to be understood. Examples include internal messages or engagement content.
Why you need a specialist to localize your regulated content
If regulated content is unclear or misleading, it could have serious consequences. This is why errors in packaging and instructions are among the biggest causes of product recalls. And recalls hurt your bottom line: the medical device industry alone incurs up to 5 billion US dollars a year in recall-related costs.
Now consider the added risks of translating this content. Can your current provider guarantee accurate, consistent terminology and keep you compliant as you scale? Are you confident they can handle complex, multi-market translations?
Imperfect translation can result in your product or documentation not being approved, causing launch delays and costly rework. Even small wording changes can affect meaning or introduce ambiguity, potentially breaching compliance and creating reputational risk.
AI translation adds an extra layer of risk, with errors more likely in some language pairs than others. Robust governance and quality checks are needed to achieve reliable results and realize the potential savings of AI.
A specialist provider like Rubric understands these risks and is equipped to mitigate them—even in the strictest of regulatory environments.
Trust Rubric with your regulated content
We have 30 years’ experience of partnering with clients on their global content strategy, from delivering high-quality localized content to building efficient, scalable workflows that support continuous improvement. Our commitment to quality and security is demonstrated by our multiple ISO certifications.
Here’s how Rubric stands out:
Linguistic excellence
We handpick qualified, experienced linguists for each project, assigning you subject matter experts who are native speakers based in country with training in regulatory frameworks.
Rubric can help you build and manage custom glossaries using controlled language and approved terminology, improving accuracy and consistency.
Compliance-first processes
We build validated translation workflows that provide full traceability and version control, enabling you to manage change across languages. Our processes meet ISO standards and give you approval-ready deliverables—no more last-minute queries and fixes.
Leading-edge technology and security
Rubric’s translation environments are fully secure, so you can be confident your data is protected and your confidentiality maintained. Our terminology management tools and translation memory control catch inconsistencies. Robust audit trails and change logs keep everyone on the same page.
Quality assurance
Our proactive cross-market consistency checks ensure all your customers receive the most accurate, up-to-date information. We can also manage your in-country review process, protecting your reputation by catching any glitches before your users do.
Speed, quality, and compliance—without overspending
At Rubric, we’re always looking to help our clients get localized content to market faster. And if we can save you money along the way, we will.
For example, we support you to create consistent, reuse-friendly content. Then, when an approved translation is already in the translation memory, we pass the savings on to you.
At the same time, our human-in-the-loop approach means we never compromise on quality or compliance. With our Assured AI solution, your highest-risk content is prioritized for human translation. We use these outputs to train an AI model to translate lower-risk material, incorporating the checks you need to achieve quality at scale.
We know time is money, and our fully transparent workflows let everyone see how the content is evolving. Review and translation can happen in parallel, maintaining consistency across languages without slowing you down. Our automated checking tools identify any variations for human review. And when you need to add more languages, our processes are built to scale.
Get global-ready content for strategic growth
Localizing regulated content requires precision, compliance, and control. Partnering with Rubric gives you all this, without slowing you down or driving up costs as you scale.
We’re more than just a vendor: we optimize every element of your localization pipeline for global readiness. From content creation to effective feedback loops, we help you get translations approved faster, with less rework and lower costs.
With 76% of consumers preferring products with information in their own language, localization is not just a nice-to-have—it’s part of your strategic growth plan. Talk to Rubric about minimizing the risks, and get high-quality regulated translations to suit your budget.