Medical Translator Used Successfully 98
saskboy writes "Translations of medical questions posed by doctors to their patients were provided by a new Canadian designed computer called MedBridge. "Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, French, and Russian," are some of the languages the MedBridge can work with. CBC reports, "If a patient is deaf, the system can also translate into American Sign Language using video. The MedBridge system is already in use at hospitals in New York, Toronto and Halifax." Pretranslated questions are stored in the computer and the doctor chooses from the list of questions to ask. It's not quite a Universal Translator, but it should improve doctor-patient communication."
Reminds me ... (Score:3, Informative)
They had a live translation service that worked through a "red phone" (it wasn't really red, but it was a dedicated, pick-up-to-talk phone) that connected to a bank of live translators. You picked up the phone and entered codes for what languages you wanted it to translate to and from, say English to Catalan, and it would route you to an operator that could do that translation. Then the patient picked up the other handset, or you put it on speaker, and away you went. I assume the hospital got a fat bill at the end of the month for every use. I always thought this was a pretty slick system, because the translators could be anywhere. I don't know how they handled it in reality, but I had visions of operators sitting around their kitchens or in small callcenters worldwide, with the computer routing them calls when ones in languages whenever they were available.
Granted, I never saw anyone actually use this system, so I can't vouch for it in practice. But conceptually it struck me as being pretty cool.
The point that TFA makes about colloquialisms is right on, however. Even a human translator doesn't take this all out. A good story is one I heard from an EMT friend of mine. He got called to the scene of an older person who had lost consciousness and was unresponsive. When there, he tried to get a history from the wife: she kept saying "He fell out! He just fell out!" And nobody had any idea what she meant. Fell out of where? Of a window? Of a car? Of his chair? Was there a possible head injury? The possibilities were endless.
Turns out, "falling out" is apparently a direct translation of the Quebecois term for "passing out" or "fainting." The lady was just stating the obvious -- the guy had passed out. To the woman, it made perfect sense, but to the EMTs, it didn't. And this was with two people, in person, speaking the same language, with one native speaker and one very competent second-language speaker. Even with human translators, unless you selected them not only for languages, but also for dialect and regionalisms, I could see this being a big problem. (And potentially a lot more serious than my example.) With a machine, the number of problems must skyrocket.
That said, I still think it's a neat development, and I'm sure it'll be an asset for hospitals in areas where the staff can't keep up with the diverse and ever-changing language requirements of their patients.