Relying on machine translation is risky in any field, but presents particular dangers in medicine.

The International Medical Interpreters Association couldn’t make it any clearer: in their Guide on Medical Translation, the section about automated translation is entitled “The perils of machine translation.” The Association “strongly cautions” medical staff against using machine translation services.

The guide offers this example of a machine translation of medical information, created by Yahoo’s Babel Fish:

- English: Women with this disorder appear to exhibit increased humoral immune responsiveness and macrophage activation while showing diminished cell-mediated immunity with decreased T-cell and natural killer cell responsiveness.

- Spanish: Las mujeres con este desorden aparecen exhibir la activación inmune humoral creciente de la sensibilidad y del macrófago mientras que la demostración disminuyó inmunidad transmitida por células con sensibilidad del T-cell disminuido y de la célula de asesino natural.

The guide’s authors proceed to explain the major errors in the translation of this passage:

“In the example above, the word ‘disorder’ became disorder in the sense of confusion or mess in the target language, but in the medical context, a proper equivalent exists and it is ‘trastorno.’ The verb ‘appear’ was translated not in the sense of appearance, but in the sense of turning up. ‘Natural killer cell’ became ‘the cell of the natural assassin.’ Those are just three errors among the many found in this machine-translated passage.”

Since the guide was published in January 2009, I checked up on the translation just in case changes had taken place. But using the same online translator, I got exactly the same results.

It would appear that in this case, machine translation is not improving very quickly.

At Language Translation, Inc. in San Diego, Spanish/English medical translation is one of our specialties. Don’t hesitate to contact us for your medical translation needs.

Betty Carlson

See Also

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

Relying on machine translation is risky in any field, but presents particular dangers in medicine.

The International Medical Interpreters Association couldn’t make it any clearer: in their Guide on Medical Translation, the section about automated translation is entitled “The perils of machine translation.” The Association “strongly cautions” medical staff against using machine translation services.

The guide offers this example of a machine translation of medical information, created by Yahoo’s Babel Fish:

- English: Women with this disorder appear to exhibit increased humoral immune responsiveness and macrophage activation while showing diminished cell-mediated immunity with decreased T-cell and natural killer cell responsiveness.

- Spanish: Las mujeres con este desorden aparecen exhibir la activación inmune humoral creciente de la sensibilidad y del macrófago mientras que la demostración disminuyó inmunidad transmitida por células con sensibilidad del T-cell disminuido y de la célula de asesino natural.

The guide’s authors proceed to explain the major errors in the translation of this passage:

“In the example above, the word ‘disorder’ became disorder in the sense of confusion or mess in the target language, but in the medical context, a proper equivalent exists and it is ‘trastorno.’ The verb ‘appear’ was translated not in the sense of appearance, but in the sense of turning up. ‘Natural killer cell’ became ‘the cell of the natural assassin.’ Those are just three errors among the many found in this machine-translated passage.”

Since the guide was published in January 2009, I checked up on the translation just in case changes had taken place. But using the same online translator, I got exactly the same results.

It would appear that in this case, machine translation is not improving very quickly.

At Language Translation, Inc. in San Diego, Spanish/English medical translation is one of our specialties. Don’t hesitate to contact us for your medical translation needs.

Betty Carlson

See Also

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