Evaluation of Online Machine Translation by Nursing Users

Nurses whose native language is not English may face a language barrier when they read nursing literature published internationally. Freely accessible online machine translation could be one possible solution to reduce their burden. In the present study, English-Japanese translations of nursing article abstracts from the major online machine translation system, Google Translate, were evaluated by 250 nursing faculty members across Japan using a previously verified method for evaluating intelligibility. The abstracts were evaluated according to sections typically classified in structured abstracts: title, background, aim, method, result, discussion, conclusion, and relevance to clinical practice. We also asked for respondents' impressions on the perceived usefulness of the translated abstract as a whole. The results indicated that Google Translate had minimally acceptable quality and identified the word count and the existence of unidentifiable words of source texts as factors contributing to translation quality. Nurses may benefit from Google Translate when reading the professional literature. However, our results suggest that more effort should be made to improve online machine translation performance, and emphasize the importance of providing training and education for nursing professionals to utilize this technology.