Communication between healthcare staff and patients is essential when making a diagnosis, prescribing treatment, addressing the need for surgery or hospitalisation, etc. When, in addition, there is a language barrier, the difficulty of analysis by healthcare personnel increases enormously. This is especially true in emergency scenarios that require greater speed and responsiveness, and where there is less time to resort to external interpreting services. Interpreters' experience in healthcare situations is also affected by the very urgency and sensitivity involved, which increases the stress of their work and can lead to misdiagnosis. If we add to all this the pandemic situation we are currently experiencing, communication becomes even more complicated for everyone (collapse in hospitals and health centres, risks of contagion, stress, lack of means to attend to patients who do not speak Spanish, etc.). This project seeks to provide a solution to the problems of interlinguistic and intercultural communication that have arisen as a result of the global health crisis caused by COVID-19.

While machine translation has made it possible to manage large volumes of pandemic-related text, this has not been possible in the case of interpretation, the automation of which remains one of the biggest challenges for current research. On the other hand, this experience also highlights the need to facilitate effective communication between (suspected) COVID patients and healthcare professionals from the very first moment, which is when the initial screening is performed in the emergency department (triage and PCR, where appropriate), who allocate healthcare resources according to the severity of the case or refer patients to specialists, day hospital or home quarantine.

This project will combine different techniques and procedures based on linguistic technologies, PLN, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, as well as multilingual and multimodal corpora.