Is MT Ready for the Next Crisis or Pandemic?

Communication in times of crisis is essential. However, there is often a mismatch between the language of governments, aid providers, doctors, and those to whom they are providing aid. It is reasonable to turn to commercial MT tools in these scenarios. But how effective are these tools for translating to and from low resource languages, particularly in the crisis or medical domain? In this study, we evaluate 5 commercial systems used for MT (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, GPT, Gemini and Claude) against the TICO-19 dataset, which contains pandemic-related sentences from a large set of high-priority languages spoken by communities most likely to be adversely affected in the next pandemic. We assess the current degree of "readiness" for this next pandemic based on the usability of the output translations.