Translation Tooling Requirements

Import functions are important in several cases. First of all for being able to import the SNOMED CT concepts which needs to be translated. As a minimum this would expect to be in RF2 format, but other, human readable, formats would also be accepted.

Import functions are also important when related materials needs to be imported such as:

• • Medical dictionaries

  • linguistic guidelines

  • Editorial guidelines and policies

  • other SNOMED CT extension's language reference sets and descriptions files which have similarities to the target translation language

Pervasive Unicode support for all input and output text, with rich conversion support in both directions. Unicode is a “superset” character encoding, with the ability to store any language or character set. Many existing tools are not Unicode-aware, creating limitations and interoperability problems.

The SNOMED CT Description Format Refset specifies the description limits and whether mark up is permitted.  The maximum length for terms in fully-specified names and synonyms is 255 characters but for definitions it is 4096 characters.

When translation is transforming during steps it is important that e.g. a 2.reviewer see both the translators translation but also any corrections a 1.reviewer has performed on a translation. Experiences have shown to be very useful when translation are performed which not follows a editorial guideline or is a translation should be changed according to a newly linguistic- or editorial guideline.

There are several key terms that are used in connection with translation memories. Some of the more common terms include:

• Full Matches

• Fuzzy Matches

• No Matches

When a translator applies the translation memory with loaded SNOMED CT translation in the same target language to not translated terms, there are several possible outcomes. One possible outcome is a “No Match”, which simply means that there are no matching segments in the memory. This phrase needs to be translated from scratch by the translator. Another outcome is a “Full Match” (i.e., “100 percent” match) which predictably means the term to be translated is identical to an already translated term in the translation memory. These cases happens if a SNOMED CT concepts have already been translated with an identical term (synonyms) but from different hierarchies/other contexts. In this case, the translator needs to verify the segment is correctly used within the context of the new translation, and simply approve if correct.

Import of source documents have shown to be valuable in as a reference during SNOMED CT translation projects. Where both linguistic- and editorial guidelines have been made available to reference and make reference annotations to related to specific translations as an argument for a certain translation.

Support for Users to be able to make annotations – e.g., "I had a problem with this translation"– at  any level of detail or scope in a comment field or similar.

In earlier SNOMED CT translation projects statistics have been used to allowing managers to both assess productivity and track compensation. Different reimbursement models have been used in earlier projects.

 The solution must be an online, browser based solution.

Any solution must be customizable to be re-branded for the IHTSDO and its Members.

Integration with existing IHTSDO components including the following would be expected:

1. IHTSDO Identity Management Service (for user management and log in)
2. IHTSDO Component Identifier Service (to assign component identifiers where necessary)

IHTSDO always prefers to make any solution available to IHTSDO Members and the community of practice under the Apache v2 open source license. This will be an advantage for any proposal offering the final solution under the Apache v2, or equivalent, open source license.