Machine translation in medicine: a quality analysis of statistical machine translation in the medical domain

Abstract

Machine translation is evolving quite rapidly in terms of quality. Nowadays, we have several machine translation systems available in the web, which provide reasonable translations. However, these systems are not perfect, and their quality may decrease in some specific domains. This paper presents an analysis and evaluation of the quality of a state-ofthe- art machine translation system in the medical domain. Evaluation is performed automatically and manually for seven language pairs. Results show that for most of them, machine translation is not ready to be applied in a domain like medicine where a translation with 100% adequacy is required.