Getting out the Message on COVID-19—How AI Has Transformed Multilingual Communication

The COVID-19 outbreak has been met with a warlike response from governments, healthcare providers, and companies. The main weapons of war against COVID-19, include not only medical supplies, but also communication, especially for disease prevention.

A delay in communicating vital health information during a viral outbreak can have an exponential effect over time; someone who does not know or follow guidelines, may unwittingly infect dozens of other people. Therefore, delays in getting out a message can cost lives.

In America, where 21.6% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, translation is a critical part of a communication strategy.

Yet despite the key role of translation for fighting the new coronavirus, many companies, organizations, and local governments are struggling to provide information in the languages of their constituencies in a timely manner or even at all.

This article introduces IVANNOVATION’s new translation system developed to meet this need and explains how the innovative technologies it’s based on can be used to benefit companies in any industry and to translate content on any subject.

CRTS: Technology to Meet the Demand

Against this backdrop of an urgent need for health-related translation, IVANNOVATION has developed the COVID-19 Response Translation System (CRTS).

CRTS makes use of libraries of multilingual data, an artificial intelligence (AI) translation engine, and professional human translators to accelerate the speed and lower the cost of translation, all while retaining a high level of quality.

IVANNOVATION uses CRTS to serve companies, health organizations, and governments by translating their health-related content into the languages of their constituencies.

As organizations’ budgets are tightening due to the economic downturn and as at the same time the urgency of communicating health information is growing, CRTS answers the market’s demand for “faster, better, cheaper” translation solutions.

CRTS: How It Works

CRTS is made up of three parts working together—a bilingual linguistic resource library, a custom neural machine translation engine, and professional medical translators.

First, IVANNOVATION feeds a library of bilingual texts about COVID-19 into its tools in order to train a neural machine translation engine. This custom machine translation engine can translate texts about health far more accurately than can mass market machine translation engines such as Google Translate.

Next, clients’ documents about health or COVID-19 are imported into IVANNOVATION’s translation tools where they are translated by the custom machine translation engine.

Finally, professional medical translators edit the translations sentence-by-sentence, correcting any errors made by the machine translation engine. Their corrections are then used to further train the machine translation engine and improve its results for the next time it is used.

Being able to edit already translated sentences allows linguists to finish the translation task far more quickly than if they had to translate the text from scratch, and an improved and customized machine translation engine means that linguists have fewer errors that they need to change. Thus translation speed is accelerated.

How CRTS Reflects a Revolution in Multilingual Communication

CRTS is built upon the principle of allowing a computer to do the heavy lifting of translation while humans do the fine polishing. At each stage the prime strengths of artificial intelligence and human intelligence are brought into play to create a best-of-both-worlds system.

Whereas CRTS is focused upon health messaging, IVANNOVATION is making use of industry-specific multilingual libraries to train custom machine translation engines for a number of other industries.

IVANNOVATION can even create custom machine translation engines for particular clients as long as the client has a sufficient amount of bilingual data with which to train the machine translation engine. The resulting machine translation engine can then not only produce translations that are accurate for the industry but also for that particular client. In this way even company-specific terms can be translated accurately.

While few know about the power that technology has brought to the translation industry, innovations are continuing to transform it. This rapid rate of change means that one of the biggest challenges can be helping the translation consumer to understand what advancements in translation technology can benefit them with their particular needs.

Use Cases for CRTS

While the power of training custom machine translation engines generally is a transformative technology, the advantage of CRTS in particular is that it is already set up for translating all types of texts related to COVID-19.

Therefore, CRTS can be used for a variety of situations related to communicating health information.

• Companies can use it to inform employees in various languages about health policies or back-to-work health precautions.
• Local governments can use it to publish multilingual guidelines as well as to translate their online COVID-19 information portals.
• Non-profit organizations can use it to inform immigrant and refugee populations.
• Hospitals can use it to translate a wide variety of health-related information.
• Pharmaceutical companies and health product manufacturers can use it for producing multilingual user guides and documentation.

As these companies, governments, and organizations make use of CRTS, they will find that they will be able to afford translating more content than ever before and to do so rapidly.

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