Presenters
Lukas Geist (ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences, Germany),
Nelson Quiñones (ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences, Germany)
Abstract
This project consists of a web application interface to facilitate and accelerate the review and curation of English-German translations for the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus.
MeSH is a global, hierarchical vocabulary for biomedical terms, which plays a crucial role in indexing databases, cataloging resources, and crafting search profiles. Accurate German translations enhance accessibility for German speakers, improve retrieval of German biomedical literature, and promote international standardization within the biomedical domain in different languages as MeSH is also translated to Spanish, French, Portuguese, among others.
ZB MED utilizes a multi-stage curation process to generate German MeSH translations. The initial stage leverages machine translation via DeepL, followed by a two-stage human translation-curation process for quality assurance. Upon completion, an XML file containing the original English terms and approved German translations is generated.
This web interface builds upon a previous version fully created in Python. The current version was built using Nuxt 3 and facilitates the human curation stage. It employs SQLite as the database, integrated with Prisma ORM, and utilizes Nginx for deployment. The interface prioritizes one-to-one translation of English MeSH descriptors while focusing on accurate rendering of main headings. Common synonyms from German-speaking countries are added to provide German-speakers a localized experience. This application could be used for translations to other languages by changing the DeepL seed to the desired language.
In the future, the interface will be extended to enable curation of updated MeSH terms beyond the newly added per year. Furthermore, integration will be implemented to automatically reflect changes made within the interface on the German MeSH XML version, e.g., modified or deleted synonyms.