Medical Brochures Translated into English and Their Comparison with Source English and Spanish Medical Brochures

Abstract

Despite the high number of publications concerning medical texts, there is a considerable gap in research regarding an important element: medical brochures (Mayor Serrano, 2003). These texts are more and more frequent in health centres to transmit specialised information to the general public (Busch Lauer 1995).Knowing the behaviour of a genre in two different languages is important for translation (García Izquierdo, 2002). Our work is based on a previous contrastive analysis about the genre of medical brochures both in English and in Spanish (Faya Ornia, 2015). Here we will observe if medical brochures translated into English in Spain comply with the features of Spanish brochures, or if a functionalist approach has been adopted and therefore suitable adaptations have been made according to the English source brochures.In order to carry out our analysis, we worked with three corpora: source medical brochures in English (collected in the UK), source medical brochures in Spanish (collected in Spain) and medical brochures translated into English and published in Spain. The analysis is based on Nord's functional model (2005), which has been completed with Kress and van Leeuwen's contributions (2006) regarding visual material.To conclude, we will mention the possible reasons that make Spanish brochures more shocking and varied than English ones, as well as address the fact that translated brochures are similar to the Spanish brochures in some aspects but similar to the English brochures in others.