Ορολογικά ισοδύναμα στην ιατρική μετάφραση: η περίπτωση των πολύγλωσσων ευρωπαϊκών κειμένων

Abstract

In specialised translation, it is advisable to use parallel and comparable texts for the search of terms and their equivalents in the context in different language pairs. The EUR-Lex database, which encompasses European legal texts in the official EU languages, is available for free use as a potential parallel corpus thanks to its bilingual and trilingual display. Apart from legal terminology, these texts also contain terminology from various fields. In this exploratory study, we deal with the field of public health in order to study medical and related terminology in the EUR-Lex texts. The aims are: a) to determine whether and to what extent these texts can provide adequate equivalents in medical English-Greek translation and b) to familiarise students with a terminology quality control process. For this purpose, we used the textual terminology theory of Bourigault and Slodzian (1999) as theoretical background. By means of twenty English one-word terms that are involved in multi-word units, we tried to visualise and check the immediate context of these terms through concordancers, in an effort to make the difference between the typology of lexicalised English and Greek terms, and the typology of multi-word variants. The final quality control of the Greek equivalents is performed by means of comparable medical texts and specialised dictionaries, on the basis of lexicalised terms. This strategy will be recommended as the main methodology for students to check terminology adequacy in the EUR-Lex corpus before proceeding to the translation of medical texts.

Keywords

• medical translation
• public health terminology
• parallel texts
• eur-lex
• concordance