With the custom MT system specially adapted to pharmaceutical and medical terminology, Celsius Data has significantly increased its translation productivity

Client

Celsius Data — a representative of several Scandinavian medical databases and a clinical decision support system in the Baltics. Celsius Data produces publications for the medical industry including doctors, pharmacists and nurses.

Challenge

Due to the highly technical terminology, translations from English into Estonian were done in-house, which was a time-consuming process. General machine translation systems could not provide accurate medical and pharmacological terminology. Moreover, due to data privacy and security concerns, the translations could not be assigned to a third party. Because Celsius Data produced medical content in Estonian, it required a single system — English into Estonian but with highly accurate and consistent terminology in different areas of life sciences.

Solution 

Celsius Data turned to Tilde and asked it to build their own machine translation system. For Tilde, it took a few weeks to developed a machine translator based on six million units of parallel data — sentences both in Estonian and English. The process involved training, tuning and retraining the system in order to make sure that the resulting machine translation provides precise and consistent terminology.

Results

With the custom MT system, Celsius Data has significantly increased its translation productivity — in less than a year, the English-Estonian machine translator has become an important tool for daily operations. More than 6.2 million words have already been translated through the machine translator.