A twofold strategy for translating a medical terminology into French.

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to assist the translation of a medical terminology (MedlinePlus) into French. METHODS We combined two types of approaches to acquire French translations of English MedlinePlus terms. The first is knowledge-based and relies on the conceptual information of the UMLS metathesaurus. The second method is a corpus-based NLP technique using a bilingual parallel corpus. RESULTS The knowledge-based method brought translations for 611 terms, among which 67.6% were considered valid. The corpus-based approach provided translations for 143 terms of which 71.3% were considered valid. We thus acquired a total of 435 translated terms (51.3%). CONCLUSION Combining two approaches allowed us to semi-automatically translate more than half of the terminology, while focusing on only one would have provided a more partial translation. From an applicative viewpoint, this French version is now integrated in the catalogue of online health resources CISMeF.