Rapid Development of Competitive Translation Engines for Access to Multilingual COVID-19 Information

Abstract

Every day, more people are becoming infected and dying from exposure to COVID-19. Some countries in Europe like Spain, France, the UK and Italy have suffered particularly badly from the virus. Others such as Germany appear to have coped extremely well. Both health professionals and the general public are keen to receive up-to-date information on the effects of the virus, as well as treatments that have proven to be effective. In cases where language is a barrier to access of pertinent information, machine translation (MT) may help people assimilate information published in different languages. Our MT systems trained on COVID-19 data are freely available for anyone to use to help translate information (such as promoting good practice for symptom identification, prevention, and treatment) published in German, French, Italian, Spanish into English, as well as the reverse direction.

Exploring Casual COVID-19 Data Visualizations on Twitter: Topics and Challenges

“…The focus was on keywords, languages, and accounts to track. Way et al referred to Twitter posts to explain the need for automatic translation of COVID-19 knowledge bases [4]-the idea here is that the virus spreads in countries that use different languages. Vicari and Murru [5] discussed examples of irony in the Twitter posts that people posted in Italy at the beginning of the pandemic.…”

COVID-19, promotion and provision of palliative care: reaching out, accounting for linguistic diversity

“…In fact, this continuing focus on medically assisted dying has led to misrepresentations about the continuum of palliative care services and its access for diverse populations. A similar scenario is occurring in the context of the pandemic: resources are made available piecemeal rather than according to a sustainable long-term plan, resulting in misconstructions of the nature and extent of palliative care available, delays in receiving the needed care and an inability to make informed decisions about palliative care wishes (8,15).…”

“…It has also highlighted acute inequities in the differential allocation of opportunities, practices, resources and policies. In this regard, a number of public health institutions, at a global level, reacted swiftly to inform the public about the unfolding of the pandemic, including specific and hard-to-reach populations, in a proactive manner with information in diverse languages (2,8). The pandemic has demonstrated that the public health responses of migrant host societies are deeply intertwined with policies as well as local rules and constraints (2,6).…”

“…Despite the lack of data related to the effectiveness of strategies used to promote and reach out to those in need of translation services, the early pandemic response demonstrated a capacity for such investments, resource mobilization and capacity building. In the COVID-19 pandemic context, interpreters' services had to be adjusted to accommodate the rigorous sanitary measures and visiting regulations adopted within most social and health facilities (8,18). In Quebec, the Interregional Interpreters Bank, a free of charge service to facilitate meetings with health care practitioners, attempted to offer interpretation by phone or videoconference via platforms such as Teams and Zoom (18).…”

“…In Quebec, the Interregional Interpreters Bank, a free of charge service to facilitate meetings with health care practitioners, attempted to offer interpretation by phone or videoconference via platforms such as Teams and Zoom (18). Yet, despite sustained efforts of this type, such services have been shown to be of limited use in addressing linguistic barriers under such circumstances (8,17). Access to the technology itself and assistance with its use quickly became a restriction to the availability of this service (17).…”