
Please perform a follow-up with your primary care doctor tomorrow to obtain a resupply of all your medications and look for immediate medical attention if you develop confusion, intense abdominal pain or vomits nausea Please follow up with your primary care doctor tomorrow to get a refill on all your medications and seek immediate medical care if you develop confusion, severe abdominal pain or nausea vomiting Variables with significance of P < .20 in bivariate analyses were used in multivariable analyses. We used logistic regression analyses stratified by language to assess associations between sentence characteristics and accuracy and/or harm. 6 For analyses, we used a binary variable (clinically significant/life-threatening vs clinically nonsignificant/no harm). Potential for harm from inaccurate translations was assessed by 2 clinicians (with a third adjudicating) using an established rating system: clinically nonsignificant, clinically significant, and life-threatening potential harm. A second translator reviewed back-translations deemed inaccurate to ensure these were not back-translator error. Two clinicians coded accuracy independently a third adjudicated disagreements. The primary outcome was sentence translation accuracy, assessed for overall content accuracy, not word-for-word accuracy, and coded as a binary outcome. Using GT we translated instructions into Spanish and Chinese, and then bilingual translators translated the text back into English.



Content categories included explanation of diagnosis and/or results, follow-up instructions, medication instructions, return precautions, and greeting. 4 We analyzed each sentence by content category Flesch-Kincaid readability score use of medical jargon, 5 such as atypical use of normal words (eg, positive test result) or medical terminology and presence of nonstandard English (spelling or grammar errors, abbreviations, colloquial English, proper nouns). We abstracted 100 free-texted ED discharge instructions and oversampled for medication changes and common complaints.
