Google Translate Error Analysis for Mental Healthcare Information: Evaluating Accuracy, Comprehensibility, and Implications for Multilingual Healthcare Communication
It addresses the problem of unreliable machine translation for mental healthcare communication, which can impact patient understanding and safety, but is incremental as it builds on existing error analysis in medical translation.
This study evaluated Google Translate's accuracy and comprehensibility for translating mental healthcare information from English to five languages, finding challenges in medical terminology accuracy, fluency, and formatting errors, with critical issues in languages like Arabic and Persian.
This study explores the use of Google Translate (GT) for translating mental healthcare (MHealth) information and evaluates its accuracy, comprehensibility, and implications for multilingual healthcare communication through analysing GT output in the MHealth domain from English to Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Romanian, and Spanish. Two datasets comprising MHealth information from the UK National Health Service website and information leaflets from The Royal College of Psychiatrists were used. Native speakers of the target languages manually assessed the GT translations, focusing on medical terminology accuracy, comprehensibility, and critical syntactic/semantic errors. GT output analysis revealed challenges in accurately translating medical terminology, particularly in Arabic, Romanian, and Persian. Fluency issues were prevalent across various languages, affecting comprehension, mainly in Arabic and Spanish. Critical errors arose in specific contexts, such as bullet-point formatting, specifically in Persian, Turkish, and Romanian. Although improvements are seen in longer-text translations, there remains a need to enhance accuracy in medical and mental health terminology and fluency, whilst also addressing formatting issues for a more seamless user experience. The findings highlight the need to use customised translation engines for Mhealth translation and the challenges when relying solely on machine-translated medical content, emphasising the crucial role of human reviewers in multilingual healthcare communication.