Medical-legal translation and living wills, two largely unexplored topics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to deepen our knowledge about medical-legal translation, starting from the case of living wills or advance directives, a medical-legal genre which still remains widely unknown to most people. Therefore, we have carried out an analysis, from the point of view of Linguistics and Translation Studies, of a corpus of several advance directives from Spain, the U.K and the U.S, in order to identify their specific linguistic features and the translation problems arising from this text genre. Furthermore, we have also applied the methodology of Comparative Law in order to study and to compare the legislation regarding living wills in the three countries.

Keywords

• traducción médica
• traducción jurídica
• textos médico-jurídicos
• testamento vital o declaración de voluntades anticipadas
• géneros textuales
• análisis de corpus
• Derecho comparado.