Loss, Gain, and Chromosomes : Readability and Translation Shifts in Medical Information for Families of Children with 10q25/10q26 Deletions

• Main Author: Runyeon-Odeberg, Kristina
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) 2019
• Subjects: medical information; medical terminology; readability; translation strategies; translation shifts; medicinsk information; medicinsk terminologi; läsbarhet; översättningsstrategier; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-90527

The purpose of this thesis for the degree of Master, one year, is to investigate the translation of medical information from British English into Swedish. The analysis is concerned with readability and terminology. In specific, the areas of investigation are how readability of the material compares to other studies, what translation strategies or sources a translator may use, and what kind of translation shifts the terms analyzed undergo. The source text material consists of some six thousand words from a leaflet called 10q25 and 10q26 Deletions from Unique, a charity organization based in Great Britain, which welcomes families located worldwide as members. The theory in this thesis is based on previous research within the focus areas of readability, terminology, translation strategies, and translation shifts. Examples include Frege (1948 [1892]), Ogden and Richards (1923), Flesch(1948), McLaughlin (1969), Vinay and Darbelnet (1995), Deléger et al (2010), Kolahi andShirvani (2012), and Acar and İşisağ (2017). The text material does not fulfill the professional recommendations regarding readability, which confirms observations from previous studies. Overall, there is a tendency towards an improved readability level in the translation, which contradicts one bilingual study (Kolahi and Shirvani) but partially confirms another (Acar and İşisağ). Of the terms identified for analysis, 49.4 % have been found to require translation strategies sorting under oblique translation, where the predominant method is transposition. A significantly higher number of terms have been found in term banks and corpora than indicated in a previous study.