Development of multilingual interview-sheet composition system to support multilingual communication in medical field

Abstract

Recently, the number of foreign residents and foreign visitors in Japan has been increasing every year. Consequently, the opportunities for communication amongst people whose native languages differ are increasing. In healthcare facilities, a paper-based multilingual interview sheet is used to facilitate communication between medical workers and foreign patients. However, this interview sheet has been found to be inadequate for such purposes. Moreover, Japanese medical workers find it difficult to understand the different languages written on a paper-based interview sheet. To resolve this problem, we have developed a multilingual interview-sheet composition system that uses parallel texts and machine translation. This system can convey essential patient information to a medical worker during consultation. The contributions of this study are as follows: (1) We have proposed a multilingual interview-sheet composition system that can be used for communication between medical workers and foreign patients. We have developed this system using both parallel texts and machine translation. (2) We showed that a patient is able to create a multilingual interview sheet using a parallel corpus and machine translation. (3) Because it may be difficult to indicate an affected area of the body using words alone, we suggest that affected areas be indicated by the user using a human-body image for more accurate communication. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.