AI Translation Project: Making Resources Accessible

We recently did a translation project for a health-related website. Consistent with their name, Large Language Models are very well suited for language tasks and are an efficient means for machine translation (Zhu et al., 2024). 

Our client had a series of PDF educational materials in English that have been created over several years and vetted by subject experts. The materials included medical terms, as well as a variety of daily living, financial, and legal language.

The materials are handed out to patients to increase their understanding of their condition, and the customer wanted to extend their utility to Spanish-speaking patients. We used AI - specifically Claude and OpenAI - to create Spanish versions of the documents. These translations were checked by a professional translator and found to be good.

For a fraction of the normal cost, our client had a set of materials suitable for a new market. The whole project only took several days, including research and translation checking.

We did minimal automation on this particular project, but we certainly could create an automation that would:

• Take any document dropped into a shared drive

• Read the text and formatting

• Translate the document into any common language (OpenAI claims 50+ languages)

• Send the translation to a native speaker or certified translator for checking

• Save the translated material into the original format

If you have any materials that need translating and want to set up something like this, let us know!