However, in practice, many hospitals don’t offer interpreters to every patient who needs one, and they’re less likely to have a way to translate written instructions. “And you end up with a medical emergency.”įederal guidelines say that hospitals and health care organizations have to provide interpreters and translators for patients who don’t speak English. “All you need is one error that creates confusion for a patient, and they don’t take their blood thinner, or they take too much of their blood thinner,” said study author Lisa Diamond, a health disparities researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Even languages like Spanish and Chinese that were usually accurate could have Google Translate errors with the potential to confuse patients.

But there was a big drop-off for Farsi (67% accuracy) and Armenian (55% accuracy). Tagalog, Korean, and Chinese had accuracy rates ranging from 80-90%. For example, Google Translate was over 90% accurate for Spanish.

That’s an improvement from 2014, when an analysis found that Google Translate was less than 60% accurate for medical information.īut the study also found that accuracy varied between languages. Overall, the translated instructions were over 80% accurate. Native speakers read the translations and evaluated their accuracy. The new study evaluated 400 emergency department discharge instructions translated by Google Translate into seven languages: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, and Farsi. According to a new study by researchers from the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Google Translate still isn’t reliable enough to use for medical instructions for people who don’t speak English.

Google translate english to tagalog