Translation Resources Research Articles

Modeling rectal cancer to advance neoadjuvant precision therapy

Progress in rectal cancer therapy has been hindered by the lack of effective disease-specific preclinical models that account for the unique molecular profile and biology of rectal cancer. Thus, we developed complementary patient-derived xenograft (PDX) and subsequent in vitro tumor organoid (PDTO) platforms established from preneoadjuvant therapy rectal cancer specimens to advance personalized care for rectal cancer patients. Multiple endoscopic samples were obtained from 26 Stages 2 and 3 rectal cancer patients prior to receiving 5FU/RT and implanted subcutaneously into NSG mice to generate 15 subcutaneous PDXs. Second passaged xenografts demonstrated 100% correlation with the corresponding human cancer histology with maintained mutational profiles. Individual rectal cancer PDXs reproduced the 5FU/RT response observed in the corresponding human cancers. Similarly, rectal cancer PDTOs reproduced significant heterogeneity in cellular morphology and architecture. PDTO in vitro 5FU/RT treatment response replicated the clinical 5FU/RT neoadjuvant therapy pathologic response observed in the corresponding patient tumors (p < 0.05). The addition of cetuximab to the 5FU/RT regiment was significantly more sensitive in the rectal cancer PDX and PDTOs with wild-type KRAS compared to mutated KRAS (p < 0.05). Considering the close relationship between the patient's cancer and the corresponding PDX/PDTO, rectal cancer patient-derived research platforms represent powerful translational research resources as population-based tools for biomarker discovery and experimental therapy testing. In addition, our findings suggest that cetuximab may enhance RT effectiveness by improved patient selection based on mutational profile in addition to KRAS or by developing a protocol using PDTOs to identify sensitive patients.

Heterogeneity coordinates bacterial multi-gene expression in single cells.

For a genetically identical microbial population, multi-gene expression in various environments requires effective allocation of limited resources and precise control of heterogeneity among individual cells. However, it is unclear how resource allocation and cell-to-cell variation jointly shape the overall performance. Here we demonstrate a Simpson's paradox during overexpression of multiple genes: two competing proteins in single cells correlated positively for every induction condition, but the overall correlation was negative. Yet this phenomenon was not observed between two competing mRNAs in single cells. Our analytical framework shows that the phenomenon arises from competition for translational resource, with the correlation modulated by both mRNA and ribosome variability. Thus, heterogeneity plays a key role in single-cell multi-gene expression and provides the population with an evolutionary advantage, as demonstrated in this study.

Building capacity for dissemination and implementation to maximize research impact in a CTSA: The University of Wisconsin story.

We report results of an 8-year process of stakeholder engagement aimed at building capacity in Dissemination and Implementation (D&I) research at the University of Wisconsin as part of the National Institutes of Health's Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Starting in 2008, annual individual interviews were held with leaders of the Wisconsin CTSA's community engagement core for strategic planning purposes. Interviews were followed by annual planning meetings that employed a facilitated group decision-making process aimed at identifying and prioritizing gaps in the translational research spectrum. In 2011, the stakeholder engagement process identified D&I as a primary gap limiting overall impact of the institution's research across the translational spectrum. Since that time, our CTSA has created an array of D&I resources falling into four broad categories: (1) relationship building with D&I partners, (2) D&I skill building, (3) translational research resources, and (4) resources to support D&I activities. Our systematic process of stakeholder engagement has increased the impact of research by providing D&I resources to meet investigator and community needs. CTSAs could engage with leaders of their community engagement cores, which are common to all CTSAs, to adapt or adopt these resources to build D&I capacity.

The Bioethics of Translation: Latinos and the Healthcare Challenges of COVID-19

The Bioethics of Translation: Latinos and the Healthcare Challenges of COVID-19 Bryan Pilkington16 and Ana Campoverde17 COVID-19 has changed the way many people go about their daily lives and the manner in which they interact with each other. Many of the bioethical issues raised by the crisis, such as medical resource rationing and the responsibility to protect the vulnerable, have not arisen anew. Rather, they have merely been intensified by the pandemic’s magnitude. In bioethical discussions about the pandemic, a significant focus has been devoted to addressing medical equipment shortages such as the lack of personal protective equipment and ventilators and the ethical responsibility to protect others through mask-wearing. This focus suggests that reflection on two common bioethical themes—respect for justice in distribution and the sharing of full information—whether related to principles of justice and autonomy or located within discussion of human dignity, would be valuable. Recognizing how COVID-19 has disproportionally affected people by race or ethnicity is critical—and taking seriously the aforementioned paths of bioethics reflection, this essay departs from the usual discussions of resource allocation to concentrate on the Latino population and the importance of translation in two senses. It calls attention to the very practical need for translation resources in situations where language barriers exist between healthcare practitioners and patients. COVID-19 has intensified these challenges, as patients who are not proficient in the English language may experience delayed medical care or face other challenges.18 It points to the need to increase health literacy within a polarized cultural context where divergent claims on critical healthcare matters are offered by social and political authorities who lack the relevant scientific and [End Page 11] medical expertise. The dual need for translation resources and for the translation of broad information is felt heavily within the Latino community. The essay will first discuss the impact that COVID-19 has had on the Latino community. Second, given the deep importance of Catholicism within Latino communities, we turn attention to conceptual resources from within bioethics and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition that bear on resource allocation and information dissemination. Third, with sensitivity to Latino cultural practices, we offer grassroots recommendations, focusing on increased church-healthcare community partnerships. These partnerships would allow for greater information exchange, including more accurate information sharing, and the possibility of shifting some of the bioethical conversation from the allocation of resources that benefit a few to the allocation of resources that benefit the many. Impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. Latino Community Healthcare studies have long revealed that minority groups face health inequalities, sometimes with devastating results.19 The infection pattern of COVID-19 was not entirely surprising for health experts who work among the country’s most vulnerable populations. Research collected by the COVID Tracking Project, led by the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, reports that Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the disease, with 58 per 100,000 deaths due to COVID-19 compared to 38 per 100,000 white people.20 This may be due to the fact that members of the Latino community are more likely to have occupations in the service industry and live in multigenerational households, two factors that increase the risk of COVID-19 exposure. Early reports paint a picture of the Latino population being one of the hardest hit communities by COVID-19, aggravating pre-existing disparities in healthcare access and health literacy. In 2015, the National Hispanic Council on Aging found that 41 [End Page 12] percent of Latino adults lack basic health literacy, a challenge further compounded by linguistic and cultural barriers.21 Research has found that across the United States, minority patients who are not proficient in English are left without adequate language resources, potentially reducing their access to quality healthcare and resulting in higher rates of adverse health outcomes compared to English speakers. Of the 67.3 million people in the United States who speak a foreign language at home, 41.5 million speak Spanish and 25.6 million speak English “less than very well.”22 To alleviate language barriers, the Affordable Care Act mandates that healthcare facilities provide qualified interpreters to patients...

Towards Medical Data Interoperability Through Collaboration of Healthcare Devices

In the era of smart devices and connected neighborhoods, the ubiquitous monitoring and care of patients are possible with the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Smart healthcare devices may serve their purpose well when they are able to share patient's data with each other. However, data formats vary widely across vendors, rendering these devices not interoperable. Recent solutions mostly rely on cloud services where a source device uploads the data, and the sink devices download it conforming to their own native formats. However, the quality of service is expected to deteriorate in a cloud processing regime with inherent network delays and traffic congestion, and the real-time data acquisition and manipulation is, therefore, not possible. This article presents MeDIC, a framework of Medical Data Interoperability through Collaboration of healthcare devices. MeDIC improves over a cloud-based IoMT by utilizing translation resources at the network edge, with its probing and translating agents. The probing agents maintain a capability list of MeDIC devices within a local network and enable one MeDIC device to request data conversion from another device when the former is not capable of this conversion by itself. The translating agent of the later then converts the data into the required format and returns it to the former. These novel agents allow IoMT devices to share their redundant computing resources for data translations in order to minimize cloud accesses. Legacy devices are supported through MeDIC-enabled, fog resource managers. We evaluate MeDIC in four use cases with rigorous simulations, which prove that this collaborative framework not only reduces the uplink traffic but also improves the response time, which is critical in real-time medical applications.

A Functional Approach to Translating Greek Conditionals

This paper proposes a paradigm shift in how the conditional clauses of the Greek New Testament are treated in Bible translation and Bible translation resources. The current resources do not provide enough information on the pragmatics of conditional constructions for translation teams to find the appropriate rendering in the receptor language. In order to translate these constructions in a clear, accurate, and natural way, translators should investigate the functional elements of each New Testament conditional, such as the illocutionary force, presented probability, and topicality.

Significance of Semantic Web – Pitfalls and Benefits of Use in the Common Judiciary

Abstract Semantic Webs increasingly allow the processing of information over the Internet according to their content and purpose. The widespread use of metadata standards has, however, caused interoperability problems between different systems. Enabling users to search for different languages requires translation resources to cross the language barrier can be a serious challenge. The presented tendency to use semantic webs is an opportunity for legislation, facilitating the process of developing and providing legal regulations and managing the progress of legislative work and implementation of procedures. The aim of this article is to review semantic web theory in relation to the pitfalls of defining and applying ontology to the machine-based understanding of content stored in the network. The scope of this article is a preliminary analysis of aspects of interdisciplinary cooperation in the metadata creation phase – indexed according to the conceptual analysis (ontology) of a given field. The area of research interest was also the benefits and pitfalls of using open source, XML and the Legal Semantic Web in the common judiciary.

Corpus paralelos y traducción especializada: ejemplificación de diseño, compilación y alineación de un corpus paralelo bilingüe (inglés-español) para la traducción jurídica

AbstractThe article reports on the processing steps followed to build a bilingual parallel corpus (English-Spanish) as a resource for legal translation. The corpus, being in its initial stage of development, is made up of 127 and 145 aligned judgments referring to English and Spanish courts respectively. The corpus was aligned by using InterText alignment software, accounting for a total number of 29983 aligned sentence pairs. The paper describes the different design stages and the technical issues related to the compilation process.

Translation technology adoption: evidence from a postgraduate programme for student translators in China

ABSTRACTThe ability to use translation technology is considered a key component of a translator’s translation competence. However, few studies have investigated the extent of use of translation technology, especially among student translators. This paper reports on a survey of translation technology adoption among 441 students enrolled on a Master-level Programme in Translation and Interpreting. A questionnaire was used to measure student knowledge and frequency of use for six common types of translation technology tools and resources: electronic dictionaries, search engines, online encyclopaedias, corpora, machine translation and computer-aided translation tools. The results show that there is a strong, positive correlation between student knowledge and their use of translation technology. More specifically, the second-year students generally used translation technology more frequently than the first-year students. This paper provides a baseline for future comparisons of translation technology use, which has implications for teaching translation technology in China and similar contexts elsewhere.

Tagalog Missionary Grammars as a Translation Resource: Translation, Book History and the Production of Linguistic Knowledge in the Spanish Philippines

This article looks into missionary grammars as a resource for investigating translation and its entanglements with book publishing in the Spanish Philippines. Although current research directions tend to use them for studying early forms of non-European languages or for historicizing the initial stages of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that these grammars can also be examined as a translational corpus. Translation was an underlying procedure in their composition and, ultimately, in the production of linguistic knowledge under the colonial condition. This article shows how the Spanish-language grammars of Tagalog, the basis of the modern-day national language called Filipino, were produced as an academic and material response to colonialism. It traces the evolution of these grammars alongside the establishment of the printing press in the Philippines and the intricacies of Catholic missionary work. It proceeds to analyse the paratextual and linguistic contents of the grammars and the translation strategies employed in their creation. The article finally describes how the erosion of the theological foundations of language in the nineteenth century was manifested in later missionary grammars and how this coincided with the secularisation of book publishing.

Regional Language Support for Patient-inclusive Decision Making in Breast Cancer Pathology Domain

A Clinical Decision Support system (CDSS) is an application that analyzes data to help healthcare providers to make decisions and improve patient care. Clinicians use the CDSS to perform their routine tasks with computer-assistance. In the past, decision-making using CDSS was primarily oriented towards Clinicians but in recent times, shared decision-making with the patient is advocated. Shared decision-making focuses on encouraging patients to become informed and involved about their health-concerns and make right choices in discussion with expert Clinicians. In India, Breast cancer is the number one killer disease among women. The fast-growing breast cancer patient population demands development of a CDSS for the domain with patient-inclusive features. Medical documents generated in English by Medical practitioners may be understood only by patients with adequate medical knowledge and proficiency in English language. To benefit the regional-language patient population, a CDSS was developed with patient-inclusive features such as Risk assessment questionnaires and Pathology reports presented in Tamil to benefit the regional language-literate patients in the state of Tamilnadu. Translation resources for the domain such as Lexicon and Bilingual Dictionary are generated and used in Machine Translation (MT) of the reports in the CDSS. Translation of Pathology reports is performed by applying Natural Language Processing methods and Phrase-based translation approach and is refined using Synsets. The machine-translation by the CDSS was evaluated by comparing the CDSS output with output from a translation tool Anuvadaksh developed by Department of Information Technology, Government of India, and Google Translate. The outputs were also scrutinized by regional language experts and medical experts. The developed CDSS prototype is a pioneering effort to compile medical language resources for breast cancer pathology domain, and to present details to the patient in a language familiar to her. The regional language support would improve co-operation between the Clinician and patients for shared decision-making and enhance understanding in patients who would otherwise be passive due to the English language barrier. The CDSS with regional language could be used in hospitals in Tamilnadu and the implementation could be extended to other regional languages of India in the future.

Knowledge Translation of Aerobic Exercise as an alternative treatment for Major Depressive Disorder in Adults

Background: Depression is a leading cause of disability globally, and evaluating alternative treatments for depression and communicating results through knowledge translation resources is important. Purpose: This student-driven, evidence-based review is a supplementary narrative to a knowledge translation video that is designed to educate the general public with regards to the use of aerobic exercise as an alternative treatment for depression in adults. Results: Evidence indicates that aerobic exercise is equally as effective as pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy for the treatment of depression. Conclusion: The effectiveness of aerobic exercise as an alternative treatment to pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy is examined. Evidence based dosage recommendations for patients are discussed.

Tooth Bioengineering and Regenerative Dentistry

Over the past 100 y, tremendous progress has been made in the fields of dental tissue engineering and regenerative dental medicine, collectively known as translational dentistry. Translational dentistry has benefited from the more mature field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM), established on the belief that biocompatible scaffolds, cells, and growth factors could be used to create functional, living replacement tissues and organs. TERM, created and pioneered by an interdisciplinary group of clinicians, biomedical engineers, and basic research scientists, works to create bioengineered replacement tissues that provide at least enough function for patients to survive until donor organs are available and, at best, fully functional replacement organs. Ultimately, the goal of both TERM and regenerative dentistry is to bring new and more effective therapies to the clinic to treat those in need. Very recently, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research invested $24 million over a 3-y period to create dental oral and craniofacial translational resource centers to facilitate the development of more effective therapies to treat edentulism and other dental-related diseases over the next decade. This exciting era in regenerative dentistry, particularly for whole-tooth tissue engineering, builds on many key successes over the past 100 y that have contributed toward our current knowledge and understanding of signaling pathways directing natural tooth and dental tissue development—the foundation for current strategies to engineer functional, living replacement dental tissues and whole teeth. Here we use a historical perspective to present key findings and pivotal advances made in the field of translational dentistry over the past 100 y. We will first describe how this process has evolved over the past 100 y and then hypothesize on what to expect over the next century.

Neighbors helping the poor: improving low-resource machine translation using related languages

Sentence-level parallel data is essential for training machine translation systems. However, existing parallel data is extremely limited for thousands of languages. In order to increase the available parallel data for a low-resource language we borrow parallel data from a higher-resource closely related language (RL). In so doing we propose a method for translating texts from RL to the low-resource language without requiring any parallel data between them. We use this method to convert RL/English parallel data and use it as an extra resource for machine translation. We show that this extra parallel data highly helps the BLEU score.

Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching: Harvesting low-hanging fruit and growing next generation resources

When biblicalhumanities.org launched in 2013, we naively assumed that software developers would know how to take advantage of high quality, innovative data if it were published in open formats under free licenses. We understood the importance of building communities that know how to take advantage of this data, software and frameworks that make it easily accessible, and tailoring data to specific use cases, but we assumed that this would happen if we just made the data freely available. Freely licensed base texts, morphologies, contextual glosses, syntax treebanks, discourse analyses, lexicons, textual variants, images, conjectural emendations, and grammars are available now, and some are at least as good as commercial resources, but they are not yet widely used. In the last year or so, Jupyter Notebooks and academic conferences have started to bring this data into academic study, but we have barely begun to tap its potential for translation, language learning, and scripture engagement for those who know the languages. To realize this potential, we need to understand the use cases and mindset of potential users and create software and other resources tailored to their needs. Over time, we need to gather feedback from these same users, walk with them as they learn and grow, and welcome them into communities that will create the next generation of resources.

Towards a Common Aim and Framework for Tools and Research in Support of Bible Translation and Biblical Language Online Learning

The broader biblical studies and scholarly community has had a burgeoning interest in developing tools and resources that are useful not only for itself, but also in support of related ministry related activities, such as Bible translation and the teaching and equipping of pastors in the Majority world context. This has led to the formation of groups such as the Global Education and Research Technologies (GERT) section of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), as well as activities and projects on such sites as http://biblicalhumanities.org and https://github.com/biblicalhumanities.&#x0D; While these groups have been valuable for productive interaction, they have not had very clear overarching objectives. Participants offer valuable contributions, but much of the work tends to go on in isolation following the inspiration and motivation of the individuals rather than of the group.&#x0D; This paper identifies this problem, some potential aims, and Bible translation resources from SIL as a sort of case study where tools and directed work from the broader community could benefit both the biblical studies/scholarly community and the Bible translation community at the same time. It also identifies the necessary work of synthesizing the specialized research and data of the scholarly community as part of the overall broader needs of the Bible translation movement. This synthesizing work is a critical notion towards conceiving a framework that would address a suggested aim for our joint communities.

The Revised METRIQ Score: A Quality Evaluation Tool for Online Educational Resources.

With the rapid proliferation of online medical education resources, quality evaluation is increasingly critical. The Medical Education Translational Resources: Impact and Quality (METRIQ) study evaluated the METRIQ-8 quality assessment instrument for blogs and collected feedback to improve it. As part of the larger METRIQ study, participants rated the quality of five blog posts on clinical emergency medicine topics using the eight-item METRIQ-8 score. Next, participants used a 7-point Likert scale and free-text comments to evaluate the METRIQ-8 score on ease of use, clarity of items, and likelihood of recommending it to others. Descriptive statistics were calculated and comments were thematically analyzed to guide the development of a revised METRIQ (rMETRIQ) score. A total of 309 emergency medicine attendings, residents, and medical students completed the survey. The majority of participants felt the METRIQ-8 score was easy to use (mean± SD= 2.7±1.1 out of 7, with 1 indicating strong agreement) and would recommend it to others (2.7±1.3 out of 7, with 1 indicating strong agreement). The thematic analysis suggested clarifying ambiguous questions, shortening the 7-point scale, specifying scoring anchors for the questions, eliminating the "unsure" option, and grouping-related questions. This analysis guided changes that resulted in the rMETRIQ score. Feedback on the METRIQ-8 score contributed to the development of the rMETRIQ score, which has improved clarity and usability. Further validity evidence on the rMETRIQ score is required.

Families Improving Together (FIT) for weight loss: a resource for translation of a positive climate-based intervention into community settings.

Climate-based weight loss interventions, or those that foster a nurturing family environment, address important ecological influences typically ignored by the traditional biomedical treatments. Promoting a climate characterized by positive communication, autonomy support, and parental warmth supports adolescents in making healthy behavioral changes. In addition, encouraging these skills within the family may have additional benefits of improved family functioning and other mental and physical health outcomes. Although several programs have identified essential elements and established the evidence base for the efficacy of these interventions, few have offered resources for the translation of these constructs from theoretical concepts to tangible practice. This paper provides strategies and resources utilized in the Families Improving Together (FIT) for weight loss randomized controlled trial to create a warm, supportive climate characterized by positive communication within the parent-child relationship. Detailed descriptions of how Project FIT emphasized these constructs through facilitator training, intervention curriculum, and process evaluation are provided as a resource for clinical and community interventions. Researchers are encouraged to provide resources to promote translation of evidence-based interventions for programs aiming to utilize a positive climate-based family approach for lifestyle modification.

Robustness Analysis of a Synthetic Translational Resource Allocation Controller

Recent research in synthetic biology has highlighted the potential of translational resource allocation controllers to improve circuit modularity by dynamically allocating finite cellular resources in response to fluctuating circuit demands. The design of such controllers is complicated by the significant levels of parametric uncertainty that arise in their biological implementations. Tools from robust control, such as $\mu $ -analysis, can be used to determine the robustness of controller designs to parametric uncertainty, but require further development to allow their application to biomolecular control systems, which are typically highly non-linear, and contain multiple uncertainties that cannot be represented using the standard linear fractional transformation formalism. Here, we show how an linear fractional transformation-free formulation of the $\mu $ -analysis problem can be used to analyze and compare the robustness of alternative potential implementations of a translational resource allocation controller that utilises orthogonal “circuit-specific” ribosomes to translate circuit genes. Our results provide useful guidelines for the construction of robust resource allocation circuitry for multiple future biotechnological applications.

A learning to rank approach for cross-language information retrieval exploiting multiple translation resources

AbstractCross-language information retrieval (CLIR), finding information in one language in response to queries expressed in another language, has attracted much attention due to the explosive growth of multilingual information in the World Wide Web. One important issue in CLIR is how to apply monolingual information retrieval (IR) methods in cross-lingual environments. Recently, learning to rank (LTR) approach has been successfully employed in different IR tasks. In this paper, we use LTR for CLIR. In order to adapt monolingual LTR techniques in CLIR and pass the barrier of language difference, we map monolingual IR features to CLIR ones using translation information extracted from different translation resources. The performance of CLIR is highly dependent on the size and quality of available bilingual resources. Effective use of available resources is especially important in low-resource language pairs. In this paper, we further propose an LTR-based method for combining translation resources in CLIR. We have studied the effectiveness of the proposed approach using different translation resources. Our results also show that LTR can be used to successfully combine different translation resources to improve the CLIR performance. In the best scenario, the LTR-based combination method improves the performance of single-resource-based CLIR method by 6% in terms of Mean Average Precision.