The computer application MediBabble provides medical staff with a way to ask key medical history questions in 5 languages.

MediBabble is a free medical translation application. Developed by UCSF medical students Brad Cohn and Alex Blau, it provides spoken translations of a large number of medical questions that help establish a patient’s medical history.

As I started reading the UCSF press release about the device, I had my doubts. Was this just another piece of machine translation technology that would be better than nothing – but just barely?

In fact, MediBabble is the result of three years of serious work by the two students and a small team of friends and supporters. And it has received true praise from the medical community and medical organizations.

MediBabble can be considered a successful real-time translation aid because it works only within a limited context: the questions necessary to establish a patient’s medical history and to get basic information about symptoms.

Using a scroll-down touch menu, health professionals can find a variety of questions in English that can be played out in audio in 5 different languages. The voices are not computer-generated, but recordings by native speakers from the medical interpreting profession.

The questions are carefully constructed so that the patient’s answers are limited to yes or no, physical gestures, or making image-based choices directly on the screen. Medical staff can also choose functions that translate certain instructions to the patient.

The app is currently available in Spanish, Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin and Haitian Creole, the latter language having been worked in after the catastrophic Haitian earthquake.

While the system has its limits, it is certainly quite a bit better than nothing when no staff or remote interpreters are around to help get crucial, basic information.

Betty Carlson

See Also

• Language Translation, Inc.
  A leading language translation and interpretation service provider for more than 20 years.