Being a technologist myself, I always look to the advances our scientists and engineers make with awe and wonder. As a society, we owe much to them.
I also know better than to give absolutes like “Machine translation will never replace human translators”. Human capacity and ingenuity knows no bounds as of yet.
That said, we need to remember that as we apply machine translation to medical information, there are legal implications and, most importantly, the basis for medical choices and treatments. Mistakes and inaccuracies with medical information are simply not acceptable.
In our medical translation workflow, the legitimate role we have for machine translation is for terminology research, and to see how others have translated text that is new for us. Please note that this is more than in the past, but still quite limited.
Otherwise, because of legal, contractual and ethical requirements, we do not have or see any other role for machine translation in a medical context at this time. We will continue to follow the development of the technology, and as it evolves, evaluate how it can improve quality, lower costs and reduce turnaround time for our human translators.
Luis Miguel, CEO tel: 530.750.2040, ext. 1
