TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF TRANSLATING SERVICE AT NIH.
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The growth of the Translating Unit of the National Institutes of Health Library, founded in 1938, was slow until 1950, when seventeen translators and clerical assistants comprised its staff. Today eleven staff members translate, type, and distribute translations from eighteen European languages. Contract service is arranged for those languages for which the Unit has little or no competency. Three recent innovations have improved the translating service: (1) production standards, (2) fee for service, and (3) microfilmed translations. A monthly bulletin, Recent Translations, a Selected List, includes those articles translated by the Translating Unit of the NIH Library. An author index to all translations cited in the Selected List is now available upon request. (+info)
Pitfalls in communication with Hispanic and African-American patients: do translators help or harm?
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The Martin Luther King County General Hospital, Los Angeles, California, provides services for an equal number of Hispanics (most are recent immigrants from Mexico) and African Americans who have lived in the community since before the Watts riot in 1965. The hospital is staffed by a large percentage of foreign-trained doctors and other personnel who speak some English, but suffer from a lack of understanding of the Hispanic as well as the African-American patients. Very few trained interpreters are provided for the Spanish-speaking population, and no interpreters are provided for African Americans. A 100-question survey on common African-American expressions was conducted in the Department of Family Medicine, as well as an opinion poll to determine if adequate understanding existed between patients and providers. The data revealed that native African-American providers understood significantly more African-American expressions than foreign, white, and Hispanic providers. The opinion poll also revealed inadequate translation of medical complaints from patients through interpreters. In addition, the poll found that diagnoses and instructions were not adequately related to the patients. Furthermore, it was felt that trained interpreters should be provided for all patients who presented communication problems. (+info)
Quality of life in multiple sclerosis: translation in French Canadian of the MSQoL-54.
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BACKGROUND: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disease which runs its course for the remainder of the patient's life frequently causing disability of varying degrees. Negative effects on Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) are well documented and a subject of clinical study. The Multiple Sclerosis QOL 54 (MSQOL-54) questionnaire was developed to measure HRQOL in patients with MS. It is composed of 54 items, and is a combination of the SF-36 and 18 disease-specific items. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this project was to translate the MSQOL-54 into French Canadian, and to make it available to the Canadian scientific community for clinical research and clinical practice. METHODS: Across all French speaking regions, there are occurrences of variation. They include the pronunciation, sentence structure, and the lexicon, where the differences are most marked. For this reason, it was decided to translate the US original MSQOL-54 into French Canadian instead of adapting the existing French version. The SF-36 has been previously validated and published in French Canadian, therefore the translation work was performed solely on the 18 MS specific items. The translation followed an internationally accepted methodology into 3 steps: forward translation, backward translation, and patients' cognitive debriefing. RESULTS: Instructions and Items 38, 43, 45 and 49 were the most debated. Problematic issues mainly resided in the field of semantics. Patients' testing (n = 5) did not reveal conceptual problems. The questionnaire was well accepted, with an average time for completion of 19 minutes. CONCLUSION: The French Canadian MSQOL-54 is now available to the Canadian scientific community and will be a useful tool for health-care providers to assess HRQOL of patients with MS as a routine part of clinical practice. The next step in the cultural adaptation of the MSQOL-54 in French Canadian will be the evaluation of its psychometric properties. (+info)
Machine translation-supported cross-language information retrieval for a consumer health resource.
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The U.S. National Institutes of Health, through its National Library of Medicine, developed ClinicalTrials.gov to provide the public with easy access to information on clinical trials on a wide range of conditions or diseases. Only English language information retrieval is currently supported. Given the growing number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. and their increasing use of the Web, we anticipate a significant increase in Spanish-speaking users. This study compares the effectiveness of two common cross-language information retrieval methods using machine translation, query translation versus document translation, using a subset of genuine user queries from ClinicalTrials.gov. Preliminary results conducted with the ClinicalTrials.gov search engine show that in our environment, query translation is statistically significantly better than document translation. We discuss possible reasons for this result and we conclude with suggestions for future work. (+info)
VUMeF: extending the French involvement in the UMLS Metathesaurus.
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A considerable number of robust vocabularies and thesauri have been developed for the healthcare and biomedical domain. No single vocabulary, however; provides complete coverage of the information needs from a public health perspective. The results of an investigation of vocabulary sources for the development of a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the public health domain at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is presented. (+info)
The development of variable MLM editor and TSQL translator based on Arden Syntax in Taiwan.
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The Arden Syntax standard has been utilized in the medical informatics community in several countries during the past decade. It is never used in nursing in Taiwan. We try to develop a system that acquire medical expert knowledge in Chinese and translates data and logic slot into TSQL Language. The system implements TSQL translator interpreting database queries referred to in the knowledge modules. The decision-support systems in medicine are data driven system where TSQL triggers as inference engine can be used to facilitate linking to a database. (+info)
Science and Human Behavior translated into Portuguese: Ciencia e Comportamento Humano.
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Science and Human Behavior was translated to Portuguese as part of the effort to begin a psychology course at the University of Brasilia 40 years ago; one of the many results of the first visit of Fred S. Keller to Brazil. The book has been used continuously in undergraduate courses in Brazil since 1967. (+info)
Relative efficiency and validity properties of a visual analogue vs a categorical scaled version of the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis (WOMAC) Index: Spanish versions.
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OBJECTIVE: To compare the performance of visual analogue (VAS) vs categorical (CT) scaled versions of the three subscales (pain, stiffness and difficulty) of the WOMAC Index in patients with knee osteoarthritis. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Patients with knee OA (at least grade II of Kellgren & Lawrence classification) were treated for a 6-weeks period with an NSAID. The following measures were applied at baseline and after treatment: VAS and CT WOMAC scales, Lequesne Index, pain on VAS, and global assessment by patient and observer. Construct Validity was determined by correlation of each of the subscale scores with the other outcomes both at baseline and after treatment (Pearson's test); responsiveness comparing baseline vs final status by Wilcoxon's test; reliability by analysis of the internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha at baseline and after the treatment period; and test-retest reliability by Kendall's Tau-c statistics. Finally, correlation and analysis of the relative efficiency (RE) between the subscales of both formats were tested. RESULTS: Seventy-three (8 men and 65 women) patients with a mean disease duration from first diagnosis of 69 months (3 to 254) completed the study. The following were the observed values for the instruments' psychometric properties: (1) construct validity: correlations ranged from 0.30 to 0.84 for VAS and 0.27 to 0.77 for CT subscales; (2) responsiveness: achieved P values for the pain, stiffness and difficulty scales were P<0.0001, P=0.002 and P<0.0001 in VAS and P=0.003, P<0.0001 and P=0.001 in CT format respectively; (3) internal consistency: the obtained Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.71 to 0.97 for the VAS and 0.64 to 0.95 for the CT subscales; (4) test-retest reliability: correlation coefficients ranged from 0.36 to 0.76 for VAS and 0.34 to 0.52 for CT subscales; and (5) the relative efficiency of the subscales in VAS vs CT format were 2.20, 0.91 and 1.91 for pain, stiffness and difficulty respectively. Significant correlations between subscales in both formats ranging from 0.72 to 0.86 were observed. CONCLUSION: We have shown that both the VAS version of WOMAC have adequate evaluative and discriminative properties. We found the pain and physical function scales in VAS format and the stiffness scale in CT format to have a slightly better performance in this sample. (+info)