Medical Translator Used Successfully

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."

Comments

Re:Application?

[246o1]

It's a lot cheaper than getting a staff of multilingual doctors, and while it would have to be quickly available in emergency situations, it could be very useful in rural applications.

If it's expense is a drawback, then several rural hospitals could get one together, and then when someone made an appointment and requested translation services, they could make sure it was at the right hospital on the right day.

This is a good practical application of translation software in a situation with clear context and limited, specialized vocabulary.

Where I live now, in rural Japan, there are people who speak little Japanese but still need medical services in English, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese, to name a few. This kind of device could be tremendously useful around here (though English isn't a problematic language, the others would be for many hospitals).

You seem to have a very skewed view of the diversity of medical staffs around the world, if you assume that every hospital will always have a doctor who can speak any necessary language available when he/she's needed.

Re:If the patient is deaf....

[ultramk]

Sadly, there is a high degree of functional illiteracy among those people who are born deaf in this country. From what I understand, a lot of the problem is that American Sign Language is not based on English, so the grammatical structures are completely different.

Seems sad to me, though. Imagine being that completely locked out of our culture's discourse... I can imagine being deaf, and I can imagine being illiterate, but I can not imagine being both at the same time.

m-