Abstract
AI language technologies (AILTs), increasingly enabled by large language models (LLMs), are becoming embedded in multilingual healthcare workflows for translation, rewriting, documentation, interpreting, and messaging in language-discordant settings. Yet fluent output is not the same as clinically safe or equitable communication: performance varies across languages, accents, tasks, and workflows, and efficiency gains can hide errors, reduce traceability, and shift responsibility across clinicians, translators, interpreters, and health systems. This narrative review synthesises recent peer-reviewed evidence across written communication, spoken communication, and emerging agentic workflows. Using the Human-Centered AI Language Technology (HCAILT) lens, it examines capabilities, evaluation practices, implementation patterns, and recurrent errors through reliability, safety culture, and trustworthiness. We identify key convergences and contradictions in the literature and propose seven grand challenges for the next phase of research and deployment. Progress, we argue, requires not only better models but also accountable sociotechnical design, calibrated human oversight, and stronger collaboration across MT/NLP, translation studies, HCI, clinical practice, implementation science, and policy.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.eamt-1.48
- Volume:
[Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.eamt-1/)- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Tilburg, The Netherlands
- Editors: Dimitar Shterionov,Eva Vanmassenhove,Mirella De Sisto,Fred Blain,Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami,Lisa Lepp,Chiara Manna,Argentina Anna Rescigno,Alina Karakanta,Ayla Rigouts Terryn,Manuel Lardelli,Natalia Resende,Elena Murgolo,Janiça Hackenbuchner,Anna Zaretskaya,Miquel Esplà-Gomis,Thierry Etchegoyhen,Dagmar Gromann,Rachel Bawden,Barry Haddow,Sara Szoc,Mikel Forcada,Helena Moniz- Venue:
[EAMT](https://aclanthology.org/venues/eamt/)- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 760–773
- Language:
- URL:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.48/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.48/)- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Vicent Briva-Iglesias. 2026.
Artificial intelligence language technologies in multilingual healthcare: Grand challenges ahead. InProceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 760–773, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation. - Cite (Informal):
[Artificial intelligence language technologies in multilingual healthcare: Grand challenges ahead](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.48/)(Briva-Iglesias, EAMT 2026)- PDF:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.48.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.48.pdf)