“You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain”Įven languages like Spanish and Chinese that were usually accurate could have Google Translate errors that could confuse patients. In one example, Google Translate turned “You can take over the counter ibuprofen as needed for pain” into Armenian as “You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain.” There was a big drop-off for Farsi, which had a 67 percent accuracy, and Armenian, which had a 55 percent accuracy. Tagalog, Korean, and Chinese had accuracy rates ranging from 80 to 90 percent. Like the 2019 study, it found that Google Translate was over 90 percent accurate for Spanish. Google Translate improved in 2016, when it started using a new algorithm - since then, one 2019 study found that it can be over 90 percent accurate in Spanish.īut the new analysis also found that accuracy varied between languages. That’s an improvement from 2014, when an analysis found that Google Translate was less than 60 percent accurate for medical information. Overall, the translated instructions were over 80 percent accurate.

Native speakers read the translations and evaluated their accuracy. The new study evaluated 400 emergency department discharge instructions translated by Google Translate into seven different languages: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, and Farsi. “You can imagine that a well-meaning emergency department provider thinking, ‘I really want to provide my patient with instructions in their own language, and my hospital doesn’t have a mechanism to do this - why don’t I use this automated translation software,” she says. It’s become common for doctors to resort to Google Translate in medical settings, Taira says. “There’s a clear gap in the ability to provide written information for patients,” says study author Breena Taira, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCLA Health. Even if a hospital does have interpreters on staff or a subscription to a phone interpreting service for verbal communication, they’re less likely to have a way to translate written instructions. However, in practice, many hospitals don’t offer interpreters to every patient who needs one - they’re expensive, and many health care groups struggle with the cost. The guidelines are designed to fill a vital need - these patients are at a higher risk of medical complications because they may not understand instructions given by their doctors. UPDATE(v1.2): Now you can change the extension options to enable automatic translation or prevent the banner automatically popped up for specified languages and web sites.“All you need is one error that creates confusion for a patient”įederal guidelines say that hospitals and health care organizations have to provide interpreters and translators for patients who don’t speak English. It does not work because Chrome does not allow extension gallery pages to be scripted. NOTE: Please do NOT try this extension to translate this page or other pages on. Click the Translate button in the banner to have all the text on the page appear in the new language.īy installing this extension, you agree to the Terms of Service at

If it is, a banner appears at the top of the page. The extension also automatically detects if the language of a page you're on is different from the language you're using for your Google Chrome interface. Click the translate icon whenever you want to translate the page you're visiting. This extension adds a button to your browser toolbar. View translations easily as you browse the web.

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