title: A twofold strategy for translating a medical terminology into French.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The goal of this study is to assist the translation of a medical terminology (MedlinePlus) into French.
  
  
  METHODS
  We combined two types of approaches to acquire French translations of English MedlinePlus terms. The first is knowledge-based and relies on the conceptual information of the UMLS metathesaurus. The second method is a corpus-based NLP technique using a bilingual parallel corpus.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The knowledge-based method brought translations for 611 terms, among which 67.6% were considered valid. The corpus-based approach provided translations for 143 terms of which 71.3% were considered valid. We thus acquired a total of 435 translated terms (51.3%).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Combining two approaches allowed us to semi-automatically translate more than half of the terminology, while focusing on only one would have provided a more partial translation. From an applicative viewpoint, this French version is now integrated in the catalogue of online health resources CISMeF.
authors.affiliation: CNRS, LIMSI, Orsay, F-91403 France.
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Deléger
authors.forename: Tayeb
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Merabti
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lecrocq
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zweigenbaum
authors.forename: Stéfan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Darmoni
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D014175:Translating; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled