Use of authentic translation in helping students decipher English-language randomised control trial abstracts.

This paper examined whether the use of the authentic translation of research article abstracts would help fourth-year medical students decipher the highly codified language used in randomised controlled trial (RCT) abstracts to understand the information. The students used our Medical English Education SUpport System (MEESUS) to read an RCT abstract. MEESUS incorporates parallel corpora of English abstracts and their Japanese translations with bilingual displays that students can use to look up words and sentences. The students used MEESUS to read an RCT abstract of their choosing and learned about the CONsolidated Standards Of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) criteria for reporting randomised trials in journal and conference abstracts. Students were asked to complete tasks including abstract information extraction following the CONSORT guideline and to write a summary. The analysis of the tasks showed that higher scores were obtained by users of the bilingual displays than non-users in all task items. The ratio of high scorers in the writing task was significantly greater in the bilingual display users than in the non-users (χ2 = 3.878, df = 1, p = 0.0489). The presence of the authentic translation seems to have led to a better understanding of the disciplinespecific, conventionally institutionalized type of abstracts in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]