Text adaptation for MIGRAnts in the MEDical area – MIGRA-MED

The purpose of the MIGRA-MED project is to simplify written medical documents used by migrants in their healthcare process. Understanding the content of medical documents is a major issue for non-native speakers, particularly migrants with a low level of written comprehension. However, these documents (like medical forms, consent forms, appointment notices, healthcare protocols, etc.) present linguistic specificities that hinder comprehension. We assume that simplified texts, adapted to this target audience, provide access to a higher degree of comprehension. This work involves the identification of the most relevant linguistic criteria for achieving this simplification.
The project has four main objectives:
1) to select and rewrite several types of medical documents based on the difficulties expressed by non-native speakers (in a participatory approach), and using the simplification criteria already es-tablished in previous research;
2) to test and evaluate experimentally with the target population the relevance of the linguistic criteria involved for the simplification, using on-line and eye-tracking measures to compare reading comprehension between the original and simplified texts;
3) to draw up a typology of linguistic difficulties and simplification criteria for each type of docu-ments;
4) to propose a set of simplified documents and simplification guidelines, as well as templates of simplified medical documents, for the dissemination in different health structures.