The Australian Injectable Drugs Handbook (AIDH): Experience of artificial intelligence translations of non-English product information

Background

In June 2022, the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia (SHPA) Specialty Practice Medicines Information Leadership Committee formally requested an expanded range of imported medicines to be included in the latest edition of the Australian Injectable Drugs Handbook (AIDH), developed and published by SHPA. This request was to aid medication safety and reduce the duplication of work required by tertiary hospital staff when producing local guidance. This study describes the challenges faced by the AIDH editorial team in obtaining information in English for imported medicines.

Aim

The purpose of this study was to determine whether machine translation is suitable for translating foreign language product information (PI) documents into English.

Method

Three sources (one machine and two human sources) were used to translate the PI provided for five imported medicines from four languages into English. We compared the quality of the translations for obtaining information suitable to inform a medicine administration guideline. Ethical approval was not required for this research article as it involved no experimental investigations on humans and did not involve human participants or cohort comparisons.

Results

Our study found machine translation and human translations to be very similar in terms of readability and adequacy. Machine translation was found to be more time-saving and cost-effective.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that it may be appropriate for pharmacists to harness the time- and cost-saving benefits of machine translation. However, pharmacists must apply their critical evaluation skills to the information provided regardless of the source of the translation. Information translated from another language relating to the administration of an injectable medicine must be verified against an English language source.