Medisan (Mar 2024)
Translation strategies of medical texts from English to Spanish during doctoral training
Abstract
Introduction: Improving communication and understanding skills in English at present is an indispensable necessity for those who conduct masters and doctorate studies, since they allow them to disclose the results of research with more precision, as well as to clearly assimilate the specialized literature. Objective: To analyze some of the main translation strategies used by the participants in the course about understanding and communication research results. Methods: An educational study was carried out in the period 2021-2022 at the University of Medical Sciences in Cienfuegos, with a sample of 42 professionals enrolled in doctoral training programs of biomedical, stomatological and psychological sciences. For this purpose, observation was used as a method to describe the training process in translation of medical texts from English to Spanish. Results: The most used strategy by doctorate students was literal translation, which was found in the 107 fragments analyzed, and it was the only one applied in 86.9% of the cases; followed by transposition (70.0%). Lexical calque was the least used strategy, as it only appeared in 11.2% of the medical texts translated from English to Spanish. Conclusions: The most used strategies were literal translation and transposition, which is due to the fact that lexical and syntactic structures serve as a basis for establishing analogies between Spanish and English languages and, therefore, facilitate the re-expression involved in translation process.
