Language safety
Translation is a safety issue, not just a feature.
How Cancer Explained handles multilingual content, AI-assisted translation, bilingual feedback, disclaimers, and adversarial fact-checking.
The translation standard
A translation can be grammatically smooth and still unsafe if it shifts a medical meaning. That is why translation needs its own review path.
Cancer Explained should prefer official translated sources when they exist. When the site translates or adapts content itself, the page should label whether the translation is machine-assisted, human reviewed, clinically reviewed, partially reviewed, or awaiting review.
The correction path should be easy to find from every translated page. Bilingual readers may catch regional wording, false friends, tone problems, or safety-critical ambiguity that automated checks miss.
- Use official translated cancer sources first when they exist, especially NCI's Spanish cancer pages and MedlinePlus multilingual health pages.
- When AI assists with translation, label that plainly and keep the original source link visible.
- Never let a translation change diagnosis, treatment, side-effect, dosing, emergency, or eligibility meaning.
- Prefer simpler sentences over elegant wording when the medical meaning is safer.
Bilingual feedback loop
A public correction path lets bilingual readers help improve the site, especially for regional wording, tone, and safety-critical ambiguity.
Reports should be triaged by risk. A mistranslated emergency symptom, medication instruction, treatment warning, or screening eligibility statement should move faster than a style preference.
Adversarial AI checks
The useful idea is not to trust one AI. It is to ask independent systems to find unsupported claims, changed meaning, missing disclaimers, and unsafe next-step language.
An adversarial review pass should produce tickets, not automatic publication decisions. Humans still need to decide whether a flagged issue is real, whether the source supports the wording, and whether the page should be edited, held, or sent for medical review.
- Source-to-claim check: every medical statement must trace back to a cited source.
- Translation drift check: compare original and translated claims for changed medical meaning.
- Plain-language safety check: flag advice that sounds like diagnosis, treatment selection, or emergency triage.
- External-model challenge: run a skeptical review pass that looks for omissions, overclaims, and confusing language.