Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
518515 Journal of Biomedical Informatics 2009 10 Pages PDF
Abstract

Developing international multilingual terminologies is a time-consuming process. We present a methodology which aims to ease this process by automatically acquiring new translations of medical terms based on word alignment in parallel text corpora, and test it on English and French. After collecting a parallel, English–French corpus, we detected French translations of English terms from three terminologies—MeSH, SNOMED CT and the MedlinePlus Health Topics. We obtained respectively for each terminology 74.8%, 77.8% and 76.3% of linguistically correct new translations. A sample of the MeSH translations was submitted to expert review and 61.5% were deemed desirable additions to the French MeSH. In conclusion, we successfully obtained good quality new translations, which underlines the suitability of using alignment in text corpora to help translating terminologies. Our method may be applied to different European languages and provides a methodological framework that may be used with different processing tools.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Science Applications
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