Medical Discourse in Professional, Academic and Popular Settings

This volume investigates the features and challenges of medical discourse between medical professionals as well as with patients and in the media. By combining sociological and linguistic research, this book illustrates how linguists and translation specialists can build bridges between medical professionals and their patients.

Pilar Ordóñez-López is Lecturer in the Department of Translation and Communication at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, and member of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). Her research interests include the history of translation, translation theory, corpus-based translation studies and legal translation.

Nuria Edo-Marzá is Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, and member of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). Her research interests include specialised languages (mainly those of health, science and technology and tourism), specialised lexicography, corpus linguistics and terminology.

Pilar Ordóñez-López is Lecturer in the Department of Translation and Communication at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, and member of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). Her research interests include the history of translation, translation theory, corpus-based translation studies and legal translation.

Nuria Edo-Marzá is Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, and member of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). Her research interests include specialised languages (mainly those of health, science and technology and tourism), specialised lexicography, corpus linguistics and terminology.

This volume sheds light on the understanding of cognitive, textual, linguistic, ethical and discourse-specific features operating in medical discourse in professional, academic, and popular settings. It is a most welcome and useful book that provides an excellent overview of a wide variety of topics. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in the language of medicine and in medical communication.

The book shows the amazing diversity of medical discourse. We learn from it that neither medicine nor linguistics should sit aloof in their ivory towers – bridges can be built between them. Both can be brought down to earth and they can serve each other, to the benefit of those who need help the most.

This book adds to the coming of age of interdisciplinarity in specialized discourse and translation research, with ground-breaking contributions that touch upon genre-oriented issues in medical texts. The overriding idea one should keep in mind after reading it is that no discourse – not even scientific discourse – is free from all textual and ideological subtexts, and this implies that ethics or the persuasive use of metaphoric language should be considered as an integral part of real-life medical discourse.