Within my electronic health record, I have standardized discharge instructions in many languages. Many of these, I can read or edit with some fluency – such as Spanish – and those of which I have no facility whatsoever – such at Vietnamese. These function adequately for general reading material regarding any specific diagnosis made in the Emergency Department.
However, frequently, additional free text clarification is necessary regarding a treatment plan – whether it be time until suture removal, specifics about follow-up, or clarifications relevant to an individual patient. This level of language art is beyond my capacity in Spanish, let alone any sort of logographic or morphographic writing.
These authors performed a simple study in which they processed 100 free-text Emergency Department discharge instructions through the Google Translate blender to produce Spanish- and Chinese-language editions. The accuracy of the Spanish translation was 92%, as measured by the number of sentences preserving meaning and readability. Chinese fared less well, at 81%. Finally, authors assessed the errors for clinically relevant and potential harm – and found 2% of Spanish instructions and 8% of Chinese met their criteria.
Of course, there are a couple potential strategies to mitigate these potential issues – including back-translating the text from the foreign language back into English, as they did as part of these methods, or spending time verbally confirming the clarity of the written instructions with the patient. Instructions can also be improved prior to instruction by avoiding abbreviations and utilizing simple sentence structures.
Imperfect as they may be, using a translation tool is still likely better than giving no written instruction at all.
“Assessing the Use of Google Translate for Spanish and Chinese Translations of Emergency Department Discharge Instructions”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2725080