Comparison of Three English-to-Dutch Machine Translations of SNOMED CT Procedures

Dutch interface terminologies are needed to use SNOMED CT in the Netherlands. Machine translation may support in their creation. The aim of our study is to compare different machine translations of procedures in SNOMED CT. Procedures were translated using Google Translate, Matecat, and Thot. Google Translate and Matecat are tools with large but general translation memories. The translation memory of Thot was trained and tuned with various configurations of a Dutch translation of parts of SNOMED CT, a medical dictionary and parts of the UMLS Metathesaurus. The configuration with the highest BLEU score, representing closeness to human translation, was selected. Similarity was determined between Thot translations and those by Google and Matecat. The validity of translations was assessed through random samples. Google and Matecat translated similarly in 85.4% of the cases and generally better than Thot. Whereas the quality of translations was considered acceptable, machine translations alone are yet insufficient.