With slightly lower agreement, there were also generally good levels of agreement (mostly above 70 percent) for extraction of descriptions of the intervention (dose, frequency, route, duration) and the number of participants randomized. The discrepancy in the results from the translated Spanish articles are likely due to greater disagreement in data extraction (unrelated to translation issues) between individual pairs of extractors than between double data extracted and reconciled extractions and the translated extractions.Īcross languages, including English, we found good levels of agreement (mostly above 85 to 90 percent) for extraction of most study design questions (eligibility criteria funding source number of centers followup duration whether the study reported randomization, allocation concealment techniques, intention-to-treat and power calculations and who was blinded.
15 Our improved methods, including double data extraction of the original language articles together with adjustment for individual extractors' accuracy in extracting English articles provides better confidence in our conclusions. With the exception of Spanish, the findings of this analysis are generally consistent with, but more robust than, a similar analysis done as a pilot study. With the exception of Japanese (where we found that extraction was fairly accurate) difference across languages was similar to the findings of machine translation experts for general translation “that translations between European languages are usually good, while those involving Asian languages are often relatively poor.” 13 The least accurate data extractions resulted from translated Chinese articles.
Specifically, extractions of Spanish articles were most accurate, followed by fairly accurate extractions from German, Japanese, and French articles. The accuracy of translation was heavily dependent on the original language of the article. Our results showed that using Google Translate to translate medical articles in many cases may be feasible and not a resource-intensive process that leads to operationally workable English versions.
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