Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Heart Disease / 29.07.2019
Google Translate Does a Good Job Abstracting Data From Non-English Trials
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jeffrey L Jackson, MD, MPH
Medical College of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Unfortunately, most systematic reviews exclude non-English trials, mostly for convenience, but nearly all systematic reviews wind up excluding at least 1 non-English trial. We looked at whether this was justified, since Google Translate is a free and easily usable platform. We had native-language speakers in 9 languages (Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Russian and Spanish) abstract data and had another researcher abstract all the articles using Google Translate.
We found that there was over 90% agreement and that the few differences were due to human error, not to problems with the translations.
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