Using Google Translate to Prepare Discharge Instructions: Spanish-Speaking Patients with Limited English Proficiency in the Emergency Department

The purpose of this project is to evaluate whether Google Translate can be used to accurately translate discharge instructions from English to Spanish, and whether native speakers prefer translations provided by a certified interpreter or Google Translate upon leaving the Emergency Department. In order to study this question, 211 patient charts with discharge instructions in English were translated by a certified human interpreter and by Google Translate; then, those translations were analyzed by two independent reviewers who counted the number of errors in each translation. The human translations contained substantially less errors than those provided by Google Translate, and the reviewers overwhelmingly preferred the human-translated instructions as opposed to those translated using Google Translate. However, there were some discrepancies in inter-rater reliability between the two reviewers, so the data obtained in this phase of the study was not entirely statistically significant for each error type