Machine Translation for Health

Translation KeyboardOverview

The vast majority of health information on the Internet is available only in English. Yet there are approximately 300 different languages spoken in the United States. For the over 46 million people living in the U.S. with limited English proficiency, obtaining accurate and up-to-date health information can be very challenging.

The demand for translation of multi-lingual health materials is not being met in part because of the time and resources it takes to create high quality translations. Machine translation technology holds promise for creating health translations efficiently and accurately. However, the quality of automated translations for public health materials is currently poor.

To address this problem, the University of Washington Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Education and Department of Computer Science and Engineering have received funding from the National Library of Medicine  (NLM) to investigate the use of machine translation technology to improve the time and costs of producing translations of health promotion materials (from English to Spanish and Vietnamese). Our goal is to improve automated translations of public health materials and to compare manual and automated translations in terms of costs, turnaround time, and quality.

Methods

Over the five year period of the NLM grant, we will:

  • Investigate current public health translation processes to better understand translation workflow and the time and costs of creating multi-lingual materials
  • Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of current machine translation technology
  • Develop novel methods of improving machine translation in the domain of public health
  • Systematically compare machine translation with manual translations in terms of time, quality, and costs

Researcher Team

Anne Turner, MD, MLIS, MPH and Katrin Kirchhoff, PhD, Principal Investigators
Megumu Brownstein, MSW, MPH, Research Coordinator
Amittai Axelrod, MSc, Research Assistant
Daniel Capurro, MD, Research Assistant
Francisco Saavedra, MD, Research Assistant
Julia Cordero, PHSKC Liaison

For questions, please contact Megumu Brownstein at megumu@uw.edu.

Learn more about why local health departments want to participate in this study.