Health Information Translations

Health Information Translations (HIT) is a website for low-literacy health information translated into multiple languages. Healthinfotranslations.org was established to share translated health information, predominantly for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) populations. Primarily provided for health care providers serving LEP patients, it is also available for individuals to access at no cost in up to 19 languages, depending on the topic. HIT was launched in 2005 as a collaboration of Central Ohio Hospital Council and the primary central Ohio health systems to reduce the barriers to providing health content in a person’s preferred language. Accessing quality health information in different languages can be challenging and translating content by trained professionals is costly. By pooling resources, commonly needed topics could be translated once and shared widely. Currently, there are 374 titles on the HIT site, totaling 3,552 separate documents. In 2021, HIT saw nearly 420,000 page views from over 85,000 visitors, thirty four percent of which came from outside of the U.S. Countries using the site most often included Japan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, and the Philippines.  
Additionally, National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus links to 288 HIT titles, equaling 3,078 separate HIT documents. In fact, HIT has been MedlinePlus’ primary resource for translated health content. HIT had 135,000 hits from MedlinePlus in 2021 alone. HIT materials are presented in a dual format with both English and translated content on the same page. Languages on the site include Amharic, Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Portuguese. Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.