iTranslate voice-enabled mobile language translation app

Purpose #

To help patients and health care providers communicate across a language barrier by instantly converting spoken or written input into another language, so that individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP) can access health information when a human interpreter is not available.

"For instance, iTranslate is a mobile app available for mobile phones with Apple, Android, and Windows systems that instantly translates text or voice inputs and converts them into text and voice outputs." (Chen, 2017, p. 2)

Mechanism #

iTranslate is a smartphone machine-translation app with a voice-recognition feature: it accepts spoken (or typed) sentences, applies algorithmic machine translation, and returns the result as text and as synthesized voice output in the target language. In this study it produced native accent, tone, inflection, and delivery in the voice output, which benefits users who cannot read in their native language.

"Such voice recognition features were developed from computerized systems." (Chen, 2017, p. 2)

"Here, machine translation refers to automated computer translations powered by algorithms." (Chen, 2017, p. 2)

Example(s) of usage #

In this pilot, iTranslate was used to translate three spoken diabetes-education questions (drawn from an NIH/CDC patient-education pamphlet) from English into both Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin), with the voice outputs recorded as audio files for blinded quality evaluation against professional human translators.

"We used iTranslate app to translate three spoken questions from English into both Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin). We recorded these voice outputs into audio files." (Chen, 2017, p. 3)

Other Notes #

The authors position iTranslate as a tool to supplement, not supplant, professional human translators when human interpreters are unavailable.