Methods and Strategies Used in the Translation of Medical Texts

Medicine is a vital profession that directly interests human life and therefore it requires a special attention when compared to the other translation types. The translator’s misunderstanding a medical text can result in a false translation which seems trivial at the beginning but even a little mistake can endanger human life and lead to the death. Because of this, the translation of medical texts must be done by specialist translators who have been translating this type of texts for a long time now. In this study, some methods and strategies that are assumed to help medical translators were introduced as well as giving some examples of source and target sentences from Vander’s Human Physiology Mechanisms of Body Function and its Turkish translation, both of which are listed imporantly among medical student’s books. Among these some strategies and procedures exemplified in this study are borrowing, a kind of borrowing which is transliteration, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, adaptation and explicitation that are frequently used by all translators for different texts. All these strategies and procedures were analyzed to Show which are included in the translation and which are excluded from the translation by the translator during the translation process in detail. The objective is to minimize the errors in the translation process and in this way to be able to determine the correct strategies and procedures in the translation process.

Keywords

The translation of medical texts, medical translation, translation strategies, translation procedure