Migrant communities living in the Netherlands and their use of MT in healthcare settings

© 2023 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, no derivative works, attribution, CC-BY-ND. Migrant communities living in the Netherlands and their use of MT in healthcare settings Susana Valdez Leiden University s.valdez@hum.leidenuniv. nl Ana Guerberof Arenas University of Groningen a.guerberof.arenas@rug. nl Kars Ligtenberg Radboud University kars.ligtenberg@ru. nl Abstract As part of a larger project on the use of MT in healthcare settings among migrant com- munities, 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 liv- ing in the Netherlands. Three main findings stand out from our analysis. First, the data shows that most migrants use MT to under- stand health information in Dutch and com- municate 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. Sec- ond, some users face challenges of different kinds, including a lack of trust or perceived inaccuracies. Some of these challenges relate to comprehension, bringing us to our third point. We argue that more research is needed to understand the needs of migrants when it comes to translated expert-to-non-expert health communication. This questionnaire helped us identify several topics we hope to explore in the project's next phase. 1 Introduction Access to health information has been recognized as essential (Royston et al., 2020; WHO and UNICEF, 2018), including in meeting the health-related Sus- tainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2020). Evidence, however, suggests that language barriers remain a significant factor contributing to disparities in the quality of care (Bernard et al., 2006; Khoong and Rodriguez, 2022; Liebling et al., 2020). When health information is not available in a lan- guage that the patient can understand, most people resort to public online machine translation (MT) as the only available alternative (Vieira et al., 2021:1519). In the context of healthcare, MT can thus be seen as a potential facilitator of a “multilin- gual health system,” where people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, such as mi- grants, can have access to health information and medical care in a language that they understand (e.g., Torres-Hostench, 2022:6). However, unin- formed users with limited MT literacy may face potential risks when using this technology, such as assuming MT output is accurate without fully under- standing its limitations (Vieira et al., 2021:1527) or assuming that MT provides privacy (Vieira et al., 2022b:18). To tackle this topic, this paper reports on a specific use of MT to facilitate communication in healthcare settings between experts and non-experts in migrant communities in the Netherlands. The paper first reviews related work on MT-mediated communication, with a special focus on health- related contexts; then describes the survey methodology adopted and reports the results. Finally, the paper discusses the findings and shares conclusions. 2 Related Work This section covers the work done in MT usability and MT in healthcare. 2.1 MT use initiated by non-language profes- …

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