The algorithm translated that into Spanish as, “keep the medication” and into Chinese as “keep taking” the medication, mistakes that the research team deemed “life threatening.” The algorithm got into trouble, however, when doctors used colloquial terms, like “skip a meal,” a phrase that Google translated into Chinese as “jump over” a meal.Ī more troubling mistranslation occurred when the doctor told the patient to “hold the kidney medicine,” meaning to stop taking it. “Google Translate is more accurate than a lot of clinicians believe, and I think it’s definitely more useful than not providing anything at all,” said Elaine Khoong, MD, MS, a UCSF primary care research fellow and first author of the study, published Feb. These were mostly due to grammar or typographical errors in the original written English instructions, which someone who could read English would have been able to understand correctly. The researchers found that only a small minority of the inaccurate translations – 2 percent in Spanish and 8 percent in Chinese – had the potential to cause clinically significant harm. After analyzing 100 sets of emergency discharge instructions translated by Google’s new machine learning algorithm, which was rolled out in 2017, the researchers concluded it was 92 percent accurate for Spanish and 81 percent accurate for Chinese. Researchers at UC San Francisco say the answer is yes – with some caveats. In multicultural areas like San Francisco, doctors are increasingly looking to Google Translate to provide written instructions their patients can take home, so they stand a better chance of following medical advice.
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