Month: March 2024

Companies wishing to apply for authorisation of biocidal products – on either a national or European level – need to submit a summary of product characteristics (SPC) to the European Chemical Agency (ECHA). In the case of Union authorisations, the SPC has to be translated into all the official languages of the European Union before authorisation of the product can be granted.

Before 10 February 2024, SPCs had to be generated and submitted in the SPC Editor. Since that date a new tool called IUCLID has come into use. That shift from the SPC Editor to IUCLID has resulted in numerous changes and affects the file format and structure of the SPC, as well as the translation process.

While IUCLID offers translation for the standard parts of the SPCs, the free texts need to be translated manually in the platform. That takes a lot of time and errors are highly likely.

We spared neither cost nor effort to come up with a way to eliminate manual work and give our clients peace of mind regarding SPC translations.
The resulting solution allows us to work using the files exported from the ECHA’s IUCLID. Our clients receive the translations back in a format that they only need to import into and open in IUCLID. They do not need to copy-paste each entry manually, saving them considerable time and money.

That sounds excellent in theory, so how it is going in practice?

Now that IUCLID has been in use for over a month, we have counted the translated SPCs we have delivered in the new era: 67 translated SPCs have been submitted to the authorities in the first month and it feels as if SPC Editor had never existed.

If you need assistance with your SPCs or other chemical documents, feel free to reach out for a translation offer.

SPC translations in IUCLID

Companies wishing to apply for authorisation of biocidal products, either on a national or European level, need to submit a summary of product characteristics (SPC) to the European Chemical Agency (ECHA). In the case of Union authorisations, the SPC has to be translated into all the official languages of the European Union before authorisation of the product can be granted.

Before 10 February 2024, SPCs had to be generated and submitted in the SPC Editor. Since that date a new tool called IUCLID has come into use. That shift from the SPC Editor to IUCLID has resulted in numerous changes and affects the file format and structure of the SPC, as well as the translation process. While IUCLID offers translation for the standard parts of the SPCs, the free texts need to be translated manually in the platform. That takes a lot of time and errors are highly likely.

In order to further help our clients meet their obligations as regards the authorisation process, we can work with the files exported from the ECHA’s IUCLID. Our clients will receive the translations back in the same format, so they only need to import them into IUCLID and open them there. They do not need to copy-paste each entry manually, saving them considerable time and money. Chemical documents, and SPCs in particular, are usually quite repetitive.

Eurideas Language Experts is a professional translation agency, specialising in fields including chemical and regulatory affairs translations, and has assisted its partners with SPC translations for many years. Translating SPCs within the very tight deadlines set by the authorities, while still ensuring high quality, may seem to require almost supernatural powers. That is why it is always advisable to entrust the translation of such documents to a specialised translation agency.

Eurideas can translate SPCs to and from all requested languages, including the 24 official languages of the EU, plus Norwegian and Icelandic. The translators are always native speakers of the target language and have a chemical background. Eurideas has a regular pool of SPC translators with extensive experience in this field.

In the past 17 years, we have translated over 10 million words for various companies and consultancies in the chemical industry. The documents range from MSDSs, exposure scenarios and SPCs to labels, studies, sworn translations for product imports and authorisations, to name just a few examples.

For more information contact us at translation@eurideastranslation.com our via our website form.