Doctors who serve well diverse communities often confront the challenge of communicating effectively with patient who do n’t share their language . Some doctors are bridge this opening with aid from Google Translate , an AI - driven app that has becomeincreasingly sophisticatedin recent years . But while a new subject field from California bear witness that the app can by all odds avail non - English speaking patient role and their Dr. , it is n’t unflawed — rarely , the translation could even cause harm .
Previous studies of Google Translate and other transformation tools in helping decipher medical information for non - English speakers had constitute assorted results . One study refer by the author , for example , observe an accuracy rate of 60 pct for patient folder translated to Spanish . But in 2017 , Google update its translation algorithm , claiming that it would substantially increase truth .
To examine this out , researchers at the University of California , San Francisco send off a band of 100 aesculapian instructions through the new version of the app . The teaching were lifted from those given by literal emergency department Dr. to patients and were translated into both Spanish and Chinese .
The outcome , publishedin JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday , were much more telling this time around . Overall , 92 percentage of pedagogy translated into Spanish were accurate , as well as 81 percent of instructions translated into Chinese .
“ Google Translate is more precise than a lot of clinician believe , and I think it ’s definitely more utile than not provide anything at all , ” booster cable author Elaine Khoong , a primary care enquiry fellow at UCSF , said in astatement . “We carefully support its utilisation . ”
That say , there was the occasional disordered instruction . Usually , these were just confusing , relatively harmless rendering , often due to a doctor ’s use of long , run - on conviction or aesculapian jargon . But more seldom , there were translated direction that would have been potentially dangerous for patients to hold out .
One example highlighted by Khoong and her team was a doctor telling a patient to stop taking a medicinal drug at some point , drop a line out as an instruction that they “ hold the kidney medicine . ” But the instruction was translate into Chinese as an instruction to “ keep lease ” the intervention and into Spanish as “ keep the medication . ”
These sort of harmful interpretation only chance 2 percent of the time among all Spanish mistranslation , and 8 percent of the fourth dimension with Chinese mistranslations . And the authors say that they should n’t void the net positive degree of using Google Translate . But there are hard-nosed steps doctors could take to prevent the worst from happening , they bestow .
These include sticking to wide-eyed , short condemnation , using Google Translate in continuative with a human transcriber ( whether in - person , via the sound , or over video ) , and writing down program line in both English and the translated nomenclature , so that an English - speaking relative or protagonist can later go over both and make certain there are no major translation fails .
Google TranslateScience
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