Translation of Finnish Duodecim EBM Guidelines® from English to French and Dutch. Helping evidence to cross borders.

EBM Guidelines® is a comprehensive collection of point-of-care guideline summaries for primary care, produced by the Finnish Duodecim publishing company.
In Belgium they are disseminated by CEBAM, the Belgian branch of the Cochrane Collaboration, through the ebpracticenet website (https://www.ebpnet.be/) on behalf of the Belgian National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (NIHDI).
In this article, the experience is shared, as gained during the translation of this corpus of almost 1000 summaries, (on average 4 A4-pages), during 4000 hours of translation and 2000 hours of medical proofread for the whole collection, for each language.
The processes of translation, medical proofread, and local contextualisation and publication are presented. In addition, this article gives an account of the comments on the guideline summaries, formulated by a medical proofreader (MJ), and shared with the Finnish editorial team. Subjects were grouped in 4 themes; the field of prevention, mental health, prescribing, and the vision on primary care. The exchange of these notes with the Finnish authors of the guidelines proved to be particularly interactive and fruitful.
The development of an interactive commentary mechanism for the medical proofreaders, the local editorial teams and the end users could enhance the quality and dynamism of this important resource.

MeSH: Family Practice; Vocational Education; Education, Medical, Continuing; Evidence Based Medicine; Guidelines as Topic; Translations