Translating medicine from English to Swedish : A translation study of a text about diabetes

Abstract: This study focuses on the difficulties encountered and the translation strategies used to translate a text about diabetes. The model used to classify the chosen translation procedures was created by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet. Firstly, the study was narrowed down to include medical terms which were names for diseases, conditions or medical events in the body such as a heart attack. Secondly, focus was put on studying how and why the procedure called adaptation was used to make the text more interesting and understandable to the target reader from a more general perspective.            The primary conclusions are that the most used translation strategy was direct translation and the most used procedure was literal translation. Most terms in English had a Swedish equivalent but in several cases the influence of the English language on Swedish medical language was quite apparent. Moreover, the use of the procedure adaptation on the text from a more general perspective mostly concerned omissions of excessively detailed information about diabetes in the US and cultural aspects such as when the process of diagnosing diabetes in Sweden differs from the American process. Finally, the study emphasizes the importance for a translator to not only rely on dictionaries but also use parallel texts in order to understand a certain concept and find proper terms in the target language was quite apparent in this study.