Our principle objective was to reduce the error rate of speech recognition systems used by professional translators. Our work concentrated on Spanish-to-English translation. In a baseline study we estimated the error rate of an off-the-shelf recognizer to be 9.98%. In this paper we describe two independent methods of improving speech recognizers: a machine translation (MT) method and a topic-ba...

n Ensure privacy and safety. n Establish rapport. n Use professional translators. Too often, the only translator available is a family member or a community member whose translation is ineffective in finding the truth. n Discuss the limits of confidentiality. n Frame your questions as common and routine. The patient should not feel as if she is being singled out. n Ask respectful and nonjudgmen...

All the above development work has been coordinated by DG XIII (Information Market and Innovation) with the assistance of four translators seconded from the DG IX translation department in Luxembourg. A considerable amount of development work has been handled under contract with World Translation Center (California), World Translation Company of Canada, Franklin Institut and Systran Institut (G...

This work investigates situations in the decoding process of Phrase-based SMT that cause particular errors on the output of the translation. A set of translations postedited by professional translators is used to automatically identify errors based on edit distance. Binary classifiers predicting the sentence-level existence of an error are fitted with Logistic Regression, based on features from...

OBJECTIVE This paper explores physician perceptions of the ways professional and family interpreters affect their performance of doctor-communication tasks described in the Calgary-Cambridge Framework. METHODS Physicians' (19) encounters with patients (24) accompanied by an interpreter were videotaped. Stimulated recall was used to elicit each of the participants' perceptions of the clinical ...

The primary foundation of teacher evaluation is establishing standards for assessing the optimal characteristics of qualified teachers.  The present study aimed at exploring standards of professional competence of adult-level Iranian EFL teachers in the private sector and developing a questionnaire to assess their professional competence.  To this end, initially, the members of the professional...