With the continuing increase of non-English speaking form workers throughout the country, the EPA recently announced that is will begin to approve Spanish-language versions of pesticide labels. In the past, there have been Spanish-language labels but they were not approved by the EPA and pesticide applicators were required to read and follow the English version of the labels. With this change, non-English speakers can be certified to apply pesticides. As a result, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture which certifies commercial applicators now offers all of its exams in Spanish.  The need arose to translate our commercial pesticide training manuals into Spanish but we do not have the funds to hire outside companies to do this (one to do the translation and another to verify the translation). 

We turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to get this done. The method we have settled on is using commercially available AI to translate our manuals into Spanish using a 'Mexican Agricultural dialect written at the 8th grade reading level.' We then take the translated manual and back translate it into English. The two versions are compared line by line to ensure that the AI program performed the translation correctly. To add an additional check on this, the first manual was given to fluent Spanish speakers for evaluation. Their determination is that the manuals were translated properly, but their was an issue with proper names that is translated literally. There are many proper names used in our manuals for regulatory agencies as well as names of pests, diseases, and weeds.  Our work around for this is to provide both the translated name as well as the original English name.  This methodology could be used to translate any publication into a number of other languages.