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Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 12:3 (2017) ► pp.405–426

Lexical variation, register and explicitation in medical translation

A comparable corpus study of medical terminology in US websites translated into Spanish

| Rutgers University
| Universidad de Granada

Differences in register, lexical use, syntactic shifts or determinologization strategies between source and target medical texts can produce usability or comprehensibility issues (Askehave and Zethsen 2000a; Tercedor and López 2012; Nisbeth Zethsen and Jensen 2012; Alarcón, López-Rodríguez, and Tercedor 2016). This study analyzes differences in lexical variation between translated and non-translated online medical texts resulting in potential register shifts, also known as “register mismatches” (Pilegaard 1997). The study uses a corpus methodology to compare (1) the frequency of Latin-Greek (LG) terms in translated medical websites in the USA and in similar non-translated texts in Spain and Latin America, and (2) the frequency of determinologization and explicitation of LG terms in both textual populations. The results show that US medical websites translated into Spanish show lower frequencies of LG terms and higher frequencies of reformulation strategies than similar non-translated ones; they are partly explained through the process of interference from source texts.

Keywords: medical translation, lexical variation, medical terminology, corpus-based translation studies, explicitation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register, lay-friendliness, and determinologization in medical translation
    • 2.1Determinologization in medical texts
    • 2.2Corpus-based studies and general tendencies of translation: Explicitation and interference
  • 3.Empirical study
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2The TWCoMS corpus
    • 3.3Materials
    • 3.4Lexical analyses
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Contrastive analysis of frequency of use of Latin-Greek terms
    • 4.2Reformulation and explicitation in translated medical texts
    • 4.3Analysis of lexical variation related to reformulations
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.12.3.03jim
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