Both groups of student translators, medical and non-medical, need to acquire a concept system of medicine and terminology, as well as be able to distinguish medical from lay terms, both in L1 and L2. But the main difference, which has an impact on the choice of teaching approach and strategies, lies in their background knowledge of biology, anatomy and physiology, including subject-matter terminology.
In this article, we present the rationales behind the choice of approaches to teaching medical knowledge and terminology to non-medical students in university ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses of medical English. We also review a book which can be used as a source when designing the content of such a course or as self-study material for students.
A range of background medical knowledge
Medical students systematically acquire and broaden their knowledge in the courses related to individual branches of medicine held in L1 from the very beginning of their studies, even before they enroll for study programmes at a medical faculty. They acquire English medical terminology in an ESP course taught usually in the 1st or 2nd year of their studies. They may even be asked to study English resources if there is a lack of literature in their L1 or because the medical lecturer and professor believe that every doctor should be familiar with terminology in the current lingua franca of medicine and science.
Medical translators, however, don´t need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the body systems, diagnostic and treatment methods, actions of drugs, laboratory tests, microbiological research, and so on. Nevertheless, they “should know enough to reconstruct the conceptual network of the original and render it in a faithful manner in the target text” (Górnicz, 2013).
The same approach is presented by Wakabayashi (1996). “Specialized knowledge is without doubt a great asset to the translator, making it easier to go beyond the surface meaning. Although such knowledge is desirable, however, a lack of formal medical training is not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to the budding medical translator. What is essential is not a medical degree, but a broad understanding of the fundamentals and a knowledge of how to acquire, in the most efficient manner, an understanding of other elements as and when necessary.”
Teaching medical knowledge
In general, medical translators “acquire the technical knowledge in a non-systematic manner through texts that they translate and any mining for information that they do on their own while working on a translation task in order to find the right target language equivalents of words and phrases.” (Górnicz).
He believes that non-medical students “are not supposed to encode their own conceptual content in texts. They will never need to use LSP of medicine creativelly… As regards course content, students need to be presented the conceptual system together with its surface realisations (terminology) in two languages. They also need to distinguish medical from non-medical usage in L1.”
In other words, medical knowledge should be presented step by step as individual body systems. A systematic presentation of a body system should start with anatomy and physiology and move to more complex knowledge such as manifestations of disease, diagnostic methods, and treatment. New concepts should be built on a student´s previous knowledge, using a so called schematic approach. The importance of previous background knowledge of non-medical students compared to medical students was researched and confirmed, for example, by Zekavati and Amoli (2013).
Teaching terminology
Wakabayashi (1996) discusses the issue of how non-medical students and medical translators can cope with unknown medical terminology. “The main difficulties specific to medical translation are students´ lack of medical knowledge and their unfamiliarity with medical terminology and phraseology. These difficulties can be partially overcome by a bilingual introduction to the key anatomical terms, diagnostic terms, symptomatic terms, operative terms, laboratory tests, and clinical procedure related to each of the body systems.”
She recommends essential techniques such as:
- Consulting monolingual and bilingual general or medical dictionaries;
- Searching the Internet to find other relevant resources;
- Studying reference materials provided by a client;
- Applying cognitive processes such as synthesis, analysis and deduction to decode meaning of the word components (affixes, roots) of medical English, Latin and Greek terminology.
Instead of acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of each branch of medicine for clinical purposes, medical translators should be advised to read as much source literature of various genres as possible to deepen their subject knowledge, and acquire terminology and phraseology.
For example, non-medical students and translators can choose from the following list that contains a wide range of real-life texts (Resurrecció, Davies, 2014):
- Research genres: academic- and research-oriented texts such as research papers, review articles, clinical trial protocols, and case reports;
- Educational genres intended for healthcare professionals, students at medical faculties, and the wider public with limited medical knowledge: course books, presentations, training courses, facts sheets for patients, popularizing articles, and medical encyclopaedias;
- Professional genres used by healthcare professionals at the workplace: clinical guidelines, summaries of product characteristics, informed consents, medical questionnaires, manuals, medical histories, nomenclatures, and classifications;
- Commercial genres: medication advertisements, product information leaflets, catalogues, labels and packaging inserts, contracts, and patents.
As a source material both for teachers when designing an ESP course and for students for their self-study, we recommend a book by Resurrecció and Davies, who describe a set of competencies a medical translator needs to have and provide examples of problems and strategies which can be used to solve them. The book also contains a chapter focusing on background medical knowledge where each body system is briefly described and then followed by a list of organs, most common diseases, diagnostic and therapeutical procedures, and main types of drugs. On top of that, there is also a list of the most common Greek and Latin roots or pharmaceutical abbreviations.
Conclusions
To sum up, I agree with Górnitz that non-medical students in medical English courses should be primarily presented with strategies which allow the continuous development of their “analytical skills (reading comprehension skills serving to reconstruct the author´s line of reasoning), the ability to find information (to fill any remaining gaps in the translator´s knowledge: data-mining, incl. Internet skills), and the ability to develop appropriate subject knowledge within a shor time…”.
He also adds that the “aim of explicitly teaching thematic content in an LSP translation course is two-fold: 1) to facilitate comprehension of the conceptual structure of the SL text, and 2) to expedite the retrieval of associated terminology and, by that, reduce translation time. An additional benefit from being familiar with the concepts behind the expressions used in a text is ability to detect and correct distortions due to poor spelling, especially abbreviations and proper names, and poor quality texts (e.g. handwritten).”
References
Górnicz, M. (2013). Teaching medical translation to non-medical students – a case study with some theoretical insights. JAHR, Vol. 4, No. 7, pp. 129-144.
Resurrecció, V. M., Davies, M. G. (2014). Medical translation step by step. Learning by drafting. New York: Routledge
Wakabayashi, J. (1996). Teaching medical translation. Meta, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 356-365.
Zekavati, F., Amoli, F. A. (2013) The role of medical background knowledge on improving the translation quality among medical and translation students. European online journal of natural and social sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 240-247.
Sign in
