Some Problems of Translating English Medical Discourse into Arabic

الملخص

Medical discourse is a very complicated variety of language. It is usually
full of risks and difficulties. A translator is required to exert a great effort to
overcome these difficulties and produce an appropriate translation. The
present study investigates the semantic, syntactic and lexical aspects of this
variety in English and shows how these aspects are realized in Arabic. The
study aims at: (1) exploring the main problems that may arise from
translating medical discourse, (2) suggesting some remedies for solving
them, and (3) proposing new renderings for the texts under discussion if the
available translations are unsatisfactory. To achieve these aims, it is
hypothesized that the semantic translation of medical discourse is more
appropriate than the communicative one. Besides, the translator of medical
discourse is not required to have a good linguistic knowledge of both the
source and target languages only, rather he must have a medical background
as well. Therefore, it is believed here that the best person who fits to be a
translator of medical discourse is a person who has a medical competence as
well as linguistic competence. To test the validity of these hypotheses, two
medical discourses have been selected from a medical book entitled Cancer
Pain Relief, which was translated by (the World Health Organization) in
1986. The main findings arrived at are as follows:
1- There are semantic, syntactic and lexical differences between
English and Arabic medical discourse.
2- The greatest differences are the syntactic ones (47.2 %). Lexical
differences occupy the second place (37.7 %), and semantic
differences occupy the third place (15.1 %).
3- These differences resulted in some difficulties through the process
of translation which in turn resulted in some shortcomings in the TL
texts (see T1, T2).