Susana Valdez


2023

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Migrant communities living in the Netherlands and their use of MT in healthcare settings
Susana Valdez | Ana Guerberof Arenas | Kars Ligtenberg
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

As part of a larger project on the use of MT in healthcare settings among migrant communities, this paper investigates if, when, how and with what (potential) challenges migrants use MT based on a survey of 201 non-native speakers of Dutch currently living in the Netherlands. Three main findings stand out from our analysis. First, most migrants use MT to understand health information in Dutch and communicate with health professionals. How MT is used and received varies depending on the context and the L2 language level, as well as age, but not on the educational level. Second, some users face challenges of different kinds, including a lack of trust or perceived inaccuracies. Some of these challenges are related to comprehension, which brings us to our third point. We argue that a more nuanced understanding of medical translation is needed in expert-to-non-expert health communication. This questionnaire helped us identify several topics we hope to explore in the project’s next phase.