Evaluation of Generative Artificial Intelligence Implementation Impacts in Social and Health Care Language Translation: Mixed Methods Case Study.

Abstract

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is expected to enhance the productivity of the public social and health care sector while maintaining, at minimum, current standards of quality and user experience. However, empirical evidence on GAI impacts in practical, real-life settings remains limited.

Objective: This study investigates productivity, machine translation quality, and user experience impacts of the GPT-4 language model in an in-house language translation services team of a large well-being services county in Finland.

Methods: A mixed methods study was conducted with 4 in-house translators between March and June 2024. Quantitative data of 908 translation segments were collected in real-life conditions using the computer-assisted language translation software Trados (RWS) to assess productivity differences between machine and human translation. Quality was measured using 4 automatic metrics (human-targeted translation edit rate, Bilingual Evaluation Understudy, Metric for Evaluation of Translation With Explicit Ordering, and Character n-gram F-score) applied to 1373 GAI-human segment pairs. User experience was investigated through 5 semistructured interviews, including the team supervisor.

Results: The findings indicate that, on average, postediting machine translation is 14% faster than translating texts from scratch (2.75 vs 2.40 characters per second, P=.03), and up to 37% faster when the number of segments is equalized across translators. However, productivity varied notably between individuals, with improvements ranging from -2% to 102%. Regarding translation quality, 11% (141/1261) of Finnish-Swedish and 16% (18/112) of Finnish-English GAI outputs were accepted without edits. Average human-targeted translation edit rate scores were 55 (Swedish) and 46 (English), indicating that approximately half of the words required editing. Bilingual Evaluation Understudy scores averaged 43 for Swedish and 38 for English, suggesting good translation quality. Metric for Evaluation of Translation With Explicit Ordering and Character n-gram F-scores reached 63 and 68 for Swedish and 59 and 57 for English, respectively. All metrics have been converted to an equivalent scale from 0 to 100, with 100 reflecting a perfect match. Interviewed translators expressed mixed reviews on productivity gains but generally perceived value in using GAI, especially for repetitive, generic content. Identified challenges included inconsistent or incorrect terminology, lack of document-level context, and limited system customization.

Conclusions: Based on this case study, GPT-4-based GAI shows measurable potential to enhance translation productivity and quality within an in-house translation team in the public social and health care sector. However, its effectiveness appears to be influenced by factors, such as translator postediting skills, workflow design, and organizational readiness. These findings suggest that, in similar contexts, public social and health care organizations could benefit from investing in translator training, optimizing technical integration, redesigning workflows, and implementing effective change management. Future research should examine larger translator teams to assess the generalizability of these results and further explore how translation quality and user experience can be improved through domain-specific customization.