Lexical variation, register and explicitation in medical translation

Abstract

AbstractDifferences 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.