1. Johanna Gerlach, Hervé Spechbach, Pierrette Bouillon
Creating an online translation platform to build target language resources for a medical phraselator
Johanna Gerlach, Hervé Spechbach, Pierrette Bouillon

2. Context
Translation platform
Evaluation
Conclusion

3. Patients at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG)
Context
52% foreign patients
Patients at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG)
12% do not speak French at all
 no common language with medical staff

4. Interpreter or phone interpreting service
 availability
 cost
MT / Google Translate
 unreliable (Patil et al. 2014, Bouillon et al. 2017)
 language availability
 confidentiality issues
Medical phraselator : based on pretranslated sentences, navigation in menu
Medical phraselators
(MediBabble, Universaldoctor)
 usability (Boujon et al. 2017)

5. BabelDr
Collaboration between the Faculty of translation and interpreting and the HUG Speech enabled phraselator for anamnesis dialogues
Phraselator -> pre-translated set of sentences
Improvement : speech instead of menus

6. BabelDr
Based on linguistic rules (synchonized context-free grammars (Rayner et al, 2016)) Billions of spoken variations mapped to thousands of canonical sentences Canonicals pre-translated by qualified translators French  languages needed at HUG: Spanish, Arabic, Tigrinya, Persian, Albanian, Romanian

7. + mapping to the closest canonical sentence 3. Validation of canonical
Il y a combien de jours que vous avez remarqué de la fièvre ? 1.
Spoken question 2.
Speech recognition
+ mapping to the closest canonical sentence 3.
Validation of canonical 4.
Translation shown and spoken for the patient 5.
Patient responds non-verbally

8. Handling repetitive content: variables
Compositional sentences with variables translated separately and replaced during compilation
Did you take aspirin for several weeks?
Did you take $$medication $$med_duration ?
aspirin
cortisone-based drugs
a treatment to block immune reactions …
for several days
for two days
for one week …
Did you take cortisone-based drugs for several months ?
etc.

9. Building target language resources

10. Context
Translation platform
Evaluation
Conclusion

11. Online translation platform
upload & create task
translation
revision
correction
download & deploy

12. translation
revision
correction
Tabular layout usual for translation memories Integrated translation memory

13. translation
revision
correction
Separate translation of sentences and variable values Translator can see sentences with variables replaced & variables in context Possibility to add new non- compositional items

14. Online (in the platform) or offline (in a Word document)
translation
revision
correction
Variables replaced
Validation of the sentences exactly as the patient will see them
Minimal expansion (each value used at least once)
Online (in the platform) or offline (in a Word document)
Revisor adds comments to sentences

15. translation
revision
correction
Same interface as for translation: sentences and variables separate Revisor comments shown as annotations to corresponding sentences

16. Context
Translation platform
Evaluation
Conclusion

17. Evaluation 5 translators Volume translated Anonymous questionnaire
Albanian, Arabic, Persian, Spanish & Tigrinya
Volume translated
~ 2'000 sentences & 800 variable values each
Anonymous questionnaire
18 questions (Likert scales)
2 Aspects:
Technical
Linguistic

18. Technical aspects – platform features
All translators who had previously translated for BabelDr without the platform (3) found it was an improvement All translators found the variable replacement functionalities helpful
average
(2)
low
(3)

19. Linguistic aspects – difficulties with compositional sentences
We asked the translators how often they encountered difficulties with the translation of compositional sentences :
segmentation : can it easily be transposed to target language ?
generic expression : is corresponding generic expression (e.g. verb) available in target language ?

20. Context
Translation platform
Evaluation
Conclusion

21. Conclusion
Translation platform facilitates creation of target language resources More linguistic than technical difficulties