An Evaluation of English to Spanish Medical Translation by Large Language Models

Nicholas Riina, Likhitha Patlolla, Camilo Hernandez Joya, Roger Bautista, Melissa Olivar-Villanueva, Anish Kumar


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) with Large Language Models (LLMs) holds promise as a clinical translation tool with more capabilities than a traditional MT model. This work compares the quality of English to Spanish translation by three LLMs: ChatGPT3.5 Turbo, ChatGPT4o, and Aguila, against Google Translate. The test set used in this study is MedlinePlus, a parallel dataset of educational health information in English and Spanish developed by the National Library of Medicine. ChatGPT4o and Google Translate performed similarly in both automated scoring (BLEU, METEOR, and BERTscore) and human evaluation with ChatGPT3.5 Turbo not far behind. Aguila, the only LLM intended for primarily Spanish and Catalan use, surprisingly performed much worse than the other models. However, qualitative analysis of Aguila’s results revealed the use of Spanish word choice that may reach a broader audience.
Anthology ID:
2024.amta-presentations.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: Presentations)
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Chicago, USA
Editors:
Marianna Martindale, Janice Campbell, Konstantin Savenkov, Shivali Goel
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
222–236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.amta-presentations.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicholas Riina, Likhitha Patlolla, Camilo Hernandez Joya, Roger Bautista, Melissa Olivar-Villanueva, and Anish Kumar. 2024. An Evaluation of English to Spanish Medical Translation by Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: Presentations), pages 222–236, Chicago, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
An Evaluation of English to Spanish Medical Translation by Large Language Models (Riina et al., AMTA 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.amta-presentations.15.pdf