Helping the helpers: evaluating the impact of a controlled language checker on the intralingual and interlingual translation tasks involving volunteer health professionals

Cochrane is a non-profit organization which mainly relies on volunteer health professionals for the production, simplification, evaluation, and multilingual dissemination of high-quality health content. The approach that Cochrane volunteers adopt for the simplification (or intralingual translation) of English health content is non-automated and involves the manual checking and implementation of plain language guidelines. This study investigated whether and to what extent the introduction of a controlled language (CL) checker—which would make the simplification approach semi-automated—increased authors’ satisfaction and machine translation (MT) quality. Twelve Cochrane authors completed a standardized questionnaire and answered follow-up questions on their level of satisfaction and preferences. Forty-one Cochrane evaluators assessed the quality of the Spanish MT outputs of simplified texts. Authors showed a preference for the introduction of a CL checker. Differences in MT quality scores were slight

Users\u27 perspective on the relationship between internal controls and key constructs

This study sought to understand a user\u27s perspective on the level of influence that internal controls had on the levels of trust, employee engagement, employee performance, and organization performance. The relationship between the level of implementation of internal controls with the level of trust that employees have for their employer, employee engagement, employee performance, and organization performance has not been adequately explored. The study was conducted on users who worked in organizations that implemented Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) internal controls, and these organizations strictly maintain all of their information in digital format. About nine hundred users were targeted from COSO implemented small intensive information-technology organizations in southeastern Michigan. The influence that COSO Internal Controls have on the levels of trust, organization performance, employee performance, and employee engagement was explored. The findings revealed that a significant positive relationship existed between the degree of implementation of internal controls and participant-reported organization performance. It was also found that there was a significant positive relationship between the level of implementation of internal controls and the level of trust an employee has for his/her employer. Further, it was found that the level of implementation of internal controls has a significant positive relationship with both employee engagement and employee self-reported performance. This study also determined that there was a significant positive relationship between the level of trust an employee has towards the employer and employee engagement in small businesses. One implication of this study is that private-information technology-intensive organizations should consider implementing a system of internal controls such as the COSO system. It is recommended that future research efforts focus on understanding internal controls interrelated components such as control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring to determine which component has more influence on the level of trust that an employee has regarding his/her employer, employee engagement, employee performance, and organization performance

Simplifying, reading, and machine translating health content: an empirical investigation of usability

Text simplification, through plain language (PL) or controlled language (CL), is adopted to increase readability, comprehension and machine translatability of (health) content. Cochrane is a non-profit organisation where volunteer authors summarise and simplify health-related English texts on the impact of treatments and interventions into plain language summaries (PLS), which are then disseminated online to the lay audience and translated. Cochrane’s simplification approach is non-automated, and involves the manual checking and implementation of different sets of PL guidelines, which can be an unsatisfactory, challenging and time-consuming task. This thesis examined if using the Acrolinx CL checker to automatically and consistently check PLS for readability and translatability issues would increase the usability of Cochrane’s simplification approach and, more precisely: (i) authors’ satisfaction; and (ii) authors’ effectiveness in terms of readability, comprehensibility, and machine translatability into Spanish. Data on satisfaction were collected from twelve Cochrane authors by means of the System Usability Scale and follow-up preference questions. Readability was analysed through the computational tool Coh-Metrix. Evidence on comprehensibility was gathered through ratings and recall protocols produced by lay readers, both native and non-native speakers of English. Machine translatability was assessed in terms of adequacy and fluency with forty-one Cochrane contributors, all native speakers of Spanish. Authors seemed to welcome the introduction of Acrolinx, and the adoption of this CL checker reduced word length, sentence length, and syntactic complexity. No significant impact on comprehensibility and machine translatability was identified. We observed that reading skills and characteristics other than simplified language (e.g. formatting) might influence comprehension. Machine translation quality was relatively high, with mainly style issues. This thesis presented an environment that could boost volunteer authors’ satisfaction and foster their adoption of simple language. We also discussed strategies to increase the accessibility of online health content among lay readers with different skills and language backgrounds