Abstract Background Problems of communication are an important barrier on the pathway to healthcare for patients with limited or no ability in the majority language of the country in which they live. ...Solutions involving interpreters who have to be booked in advance, or using unqualified friends or family members to translate, are highly unsatisfactory. Aim This paper describes a computer-based approach to alleviating the situation. Design/method A computer-based communication aid was developed and tested. The communication aid is designed to permit an English-speaking healthcare practitioner to select a series of questions which are then presented along with a range of possible answers for the patient to choose from. The questions and answers are presented in the patient's own language in both text and digitised speech accompanied by symbols as well as English text. As a test-case we focused on Somali patients with asthma. Results 26 simulated consultations with Somali asthma sufferers and healthcare practitioners (three GPs and six nurses) with experience of asthma treatment with this patient group were held with the system implemented either on a laptop with mouse pad, or a tablet with stylus. All the consultations were successfully completed with a high satisfaction rate on the part of both practitioners and patients. Conclusion Feedback questionnaires suggest some areas for improvement. The proposed system is a practical way of addressing the problem of communication with patients with limited English in the context of clinician-led question–answer dialogues.
This paper, accompanied by peer group commentary and author's response, is a discussion paper concerning the state of the art in Machine Translation. The current orthodoxy is first summarized, then ...criticized. A number of research projects based on the standard architecture are discussed: they involve the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques, advanced linguistic theories, and sublanguage. Alternative approaches discussed are systems which develop or update their grammars semi-automatically, dialogue MT, and corpus-based MT including example-based and statistical approaches.
The field of machine translation (MT) -- the automation of translation
between human languages -- has existed for more than fifty years. MT helped to usher
in the field of computational linguistics ...and has influenced methods and
applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical
statistics.This valuable resource offers the most historically
significant English-language articles on MT. The book is organized in three
sections. The historical section contains articles from MT's beginnings through the
late 1960s. The second section, on theoretical and methodological issues, covers
sublanguage and controlled input, the role of humans in machine-aided translation,
the impact of certain linguistic approaches, the transfer versus interlingua
question, and the representation of meaning and knowledge. The third section, on
system design, covers knowledge-based, statistical, and example-based approaches to
multilevel analysis and representation, as well as computational issues.
The field of machine translation (MT) -- the automation of translation between human languages -- has existed for more than fifty years. MT helped to usher in the field of computational linguistics ...and has influenced methods and applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical statistics.This valuable resource offers the most historically significant English-language articles on MT. The book is organized in three sections. The historical section contains articles from MT's beginnings through the late 1960s. The second section, on theoretical and methodological issues, covers sublanguage and controlled input, the role of humans in machine-aided translation, the impact of certain linguistic approaches, the transfer versus interlingua question, and the representation of meaning and knowledge. The third section, on system design, covers knowledge-based, statistical, and example-based approaches to multilevel analysis and representation, as well as computational issues.
A state-of-the-art volume highlighting the links between lexicography, terminology, language for special purposes (LSP) and translation and Machine Translation, that constitute the domain of Language ...Engineering.Part I: Terminology and Lexicography. Takes us through terminological problems and solutions in Europe, the former Soviet Union and Egypt.Part II focuses on LSP for second language learners and lexical analysis.Part III treats translator training in a historical context, as well as new methods from cognitive and corpus linguistics.Part IV is about the application of language engineering in Machine Translation, corpus linguistics and multilingual text generation.
This volume is about computers and translation. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other ...professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer.The editor and main contributor, Harold Somers, is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 years' experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, Somers is editor of one of the field's premier journals, and has written extensively on the subject, including the field's most widely quoted textbook on MT, now out of print and somewhat out of date.The current volume aims to provide an accessible yet not overwhelmingly technical book aimed primarily at translators and other users of CAT software.
In a recent paper published in this journal (Covington 1996), an algorithm is described which aligns segments within a pair of words for the purpose of identifying historical cognates. This algorithm ...could have a further application in the field of speech therapy, and in particular in the practice of articulation assessment of young children. The present author developed a similar algorithm some years ago for this purpose. In this paper, we explore some points of comparison between the two applications.
This paper concerns the methods of evaluation of a computational translator's aid known as a Translation Memory (TM). A typical TM system selects candidate translations into a target language by ...obtaining matches to an input source-language sentence from a database comprising source-target pairs of previously translated sentences. We describe a metric for evaluating TMs and illustrate it with a case study based on a particular commercial TM system and a database of French-English sentence pairs specifically created from a previously translated text. This metric builds on definitions of the familiar parameters of precision and recall, and involves a measure of the `usefulness' to a translator of the selections made by the system. Several variations on these parameters and suggested weighting schemes are discussed in the search for a suitable metric, resulting in a `weighted precision' measure based on the number of keystrokes needed to correct the proposed text. In combination with appropriate measures of recall, parameters which could serve both as numerical optimization criteria to be employed by the translator in seeking the most efficient use of a TM tool, and as means of carrying out quantitative evaluations of such systems are defined.
