Google’s Community Translation Project for Health Care

Article Details

Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Nataly Kelly on September 6, 2010 in the following blogs: Technology, Translation and Localization
Pages \| \|

This week, Google’s philanthropic arm (Google.org) announced an initiative called Health Speaks, which seeks to make health-related information available to individuals throughout the world, regardless of language. Starting with Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili, the project will use community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation to address an important but often-overlooked disparity – access to health information.

Here’s how the project works:

Volunteers will translate health articles. For its pilot project, Google has elected to have volunteers translate Wikipedia articles covering a variety of health care topics. Individuals will not be paid for their volunteer translation work, and must use Google Translator Toolkit.

Google will donate to health care non-profits. For each word translated from English during the first 60 days of the project, Google will donate US$0.03 to one of three non-profit organizations – the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the African Medical and Research Foundation, up to a total of US$150,000.

Language barriers will be (partially) addressed. The initial project is only a pilot, but Google has made it clear that the long-term goal is to reduce the barrier to knowledge-based health care in nations with limited access to health information.

As longtime observers and occasional practitioners of community translation initiatives, we have some suggestions for the project:

Start recruiting for other languages now. Because the project is initially aimed at just three languages, a volunteer can only sign up for Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili. However, it would be a good idea to use the same sign-up form to capture volunteer information for other languages too, as Twitter did when it first started with community translation. In fact, it’s highly likely that many of the same individuals signing up to volunteer for the three pilot languages would be glad to volunteer for other languages too. Simply adding the question, “What other languages do you speak?” would enable Google to build a larger base of volunteers to extend its language reach for future projects.

Target volunteers in a diverse array of nations. We noticed that the registration form asks volunteers to name their country of residence, but nations with some of the largest populations of qualified translators are not listed. For example, individuals living in the United Kingdom and the United States could be tremendous recruitment sources for the project. Other countries that are home to large numbers of immigrant and refugee populations may also have volunteers with plenty of expertise to assist. The project is more likely to catch on if it’s marketed globally from the start.

Encourage translators to participate too. The sign-up form does not include “translator” or “interpreter” as choices for professions. While this might have been a strategic decision by Google to prevent backlash from the translation industry experienced by companies such as LinkedIn, the goals of this program clearly benefit society at large. It’s also something that we believe a lot of freelance translators and interpreters will support, especially those working in the healthcare community, since they understand the significance of language-related health information disparities.

Make the information available via audio. Once translations are finished, it would be ideal to provide the information in audio format, or even video. While this is probably a few steps ahead of the pilot project’s objectives, we can’t emphasize enough that text alone is inadequate. Spoken language is accessible to much larger segments of the world’s population, especially those with low levels of health literacy. And, multimedia output will take on more importance than ever – especially in developing nations – as more people access information using mobile devices.

We’ve written before about efforts by international and domestic organizations --such as the World Health Organization and the Refugee Health Information Network -- to make health-related information available in multiple languages. This is of critical importance – especially in disaster response settings. What these organizations have traditionally lacked were the multilingual human networks to make large-scale efforts possible.

So, the fact that Google is committing resources to making health care information available in multiple languages is not just worth noting – it’s of tremendous importance. If Google can build a community of individuals willing to translate health care information into many languages, it could serve to bridge one of the most important gaps in access to information affecting people’s lives today.

Categories