On the reception of biomedical translation: comparing and contrasting health professionals’ evaluation of translation options and expectations about the safe use of medical devices in Portuguese

Abstract

ABSTRACT Little is known about health professionals’ evaluation of translation options and expectations about communicating risks concerning the use of medical devices. Since translators’ decisions are (at least partially) based on what they believe readers expect from the translated product, investigating health professionals’ reception of translated medical texts is particularly useful. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of translation norms, this article reports on a questionnaire involving 34 Portuguese health professionals who were asked to evaluate translated instructions for a medical device. This evaluation was followed by questions on the health professionals’ expectations. The results suggest that readers’ expectations about how translators should translate do not coincide with their evaluation of translation options. In other words, the findings point to a contradiction between what health professionals say translators should do when translating biomedical texts and what are their preferred translation options when evaluating translated excerpts. We believe these findings can contribute to the awareness of health professionals’ dominating discourses of faithfulness and fidelity towards the original in the translation of biomedical texts and their influence on perceptions of quality. These discourses, as the findings suggest, can have implications on how readers perceive how translators should translate.