IVANNOVATION Announces Development of COVID-19 Response Translation System

Greenville, SC, April 09, 2020 --(PR.com)-- IVANNOVATION Language Management has added a service based on its new COVID-19 Response Translation System (CRTS) to meet the new coronavirus crisis facing health providers and the public at large. It has developed specialized COVID-19 language resources based on a massive collection of bilingual health materials in a number of languages. These resources used by human medical translators will lower the cost and increase the speed of translating COVID-19-related materials.

IVANNOVATION has taken this step due to the serious lack of COVID-19 information for America's population of approximately 25 million people with low English proficiency.

Due to the way viruses spread, this lack of information can have a greater impact on the nation's health than would be immediately apparent.

In epidemics, small changes and prevention measures can have a vastly multiplied effect over a period of only weeks. For example, if a community of Spanish speakers were to have access to up-to-date information, they could avoid getting infected by others and/or infect fewer other people in public places, such as grocery stores. Then as time goes on, the effect is multiplied exponentially.

This viral growth factor, together with the rapidly evolving response to COVID-19, means that having timely translations of information into languages other than English is urgently needed.

Despite this urgency, access to information about the new coronavirus in languages other than English remains spotty. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 website is currently available in only Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. The California CDC website provides a Google Translate plugin with free translation into a number of languages, but the inaccuracy of the translation could itself be a hazard. Further, countless local governments and healthcare providers lack materials in the languages of many of their constituencies.

IVANNOVATION's new service makes use of what it calls the COVID-19 Response Translation System (CRTS). CRTS uses translation technology, language resources, and expert human translators to increase translation speed while preserving high quality standards.

CRTS uses a massive bilingual corpus (a collection of texts with their translations) on epidemiology, medical language, and viruses in a variety of languages together with the company's unique translation technology to train a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine.

The resulting custom trained machine translation engine has a far greater accuracy for the specialized topic of COVID-19 than does a general use machine translation engine such as Google Translate.

The machine translation engine is then used in IVANNOVATION's translation tools as a resource for certified medical human linguists. The machine translation engine provides translations to the linguists in the form of suggestions.

When translating, the linguists can read the suggestions and either accept them with a click of a button, or they can make slight changes to the suggestions and then accept them. The changes made by the linguists are then fed back into the machine translation engine to improve future results.

By using this method, the time and cost required for translating texts related to the virus can be lowered significantly while still retaining a high level of accuracy. CRTS will allow healthcare providers, medical supply companies, health authorities, and others to better respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with information for non-English speakers.

IVANNOVATION Language Management (https://ivannovation.com) is a premier translation and localization provider of user interface, documentation, and marketing materials for the IT, software development, legal, construction, and manufacturing industries. It provides translations of technical materials into all major European and Asian languages.