Advantages of MT
The advantages of machine translation (MT) in the healthcare industry are numerous, enhancing patient experience and satisfaction through effective communication. In healthcare settings, where accurate communication between healthcare providers and patients is paramount, MT ensures seamless communication, especially in emergency situations. With advancements in example-based machine translation, memory-based translation, and statistical machine translation, the accuracy of translations has significantly improved. This is particularly beneficial for medical interpreters and translators who work with medical records and treatment options.
MT tools like MediBabble Translator and Bing Translator support professional interpreters in bridging the communication gap between non-native speakers and healthcare professionals. These tools are indispensable for translating medical history, conditions, and regulatory requirements, ensuring that patients receive quality care and are able to make informed decisions. Additionally, MT facilitates cross-cultural communication by accommodating the preferred and primary languages of diverse patient populations, such as Spanish speakers and other European language speakers. As a result, MT contributes to positive patient outcomes by reducing translation errors, meeting legal requirements like Title VI, and supporting the healthcare industry’s need for professional language services. The extensive experience of MT providers, such as Mars Translation, highlights ongoing translation industry trends that continue to push the boundaries of what MT can achieve in clinical conversations and everyday communication in healthcare.
Machine translation software can translate written or spoken text from one language to another. It can help bridge the language gap in countries with large populations of people who do not speak the dominant language.
This is especially important for public health, as it allows medical professionals to treat more patients by translating medical texts.
Machine translators also make medical education more accessible to speakers of minority languages, and help doctors gain expertise in different languages and dialects.
In addition, machine translations are faster than human translations, which reduces cost and increases availability of information on important topics such as infectious diseases.
MT is not perfect–sometimes it gets words wrong or makes mistakes in grammar and syntax–but it is less expensive than hiring human translators and typically offers a better quality translation.
Shortcomings of MT
Machine translation can help with translating medical instructions and cell lung cancer histopathology images, but it does not work well for complicated technical texts.
It has trouble understanding sentences that have long words or phrases, it has difficulty with different spellings of the same word, and it does not understand idioms. A computer cannot catch grammatical errors in the sentence structure of clinical records.
MT does not translate any code because some code may be case-sensitive. It is difficult to find an algorithm that could accurately predict mutations because mutation prediction is a new field.
MT also relies on parallel text translations from multiple language sources to improve its translations, and translators do not always get things right when writing down their interpretations of what they see in text (translators make mistakes).