Abstract Translation is not an easy task. There is a plethora of problems and difficulties which needs to be tackled in the process of translating a text from one language to another. This analysis concentrates on three of them – terminology, connectors and cultural aspects. The study is based on the Swedish translation of an English text concerning the medical and ritual use of chocolate in ancient Native American cultures as well as in Europe during the colonial era. The main problem encountered in the translation of this text was how to generalize it so it would suit the Swedish public but still maintain the level of formality of the source text. The specialized terminology found belongs to the fields of medicine and botany and these terms were often explained or replaced with more common words. A couple of the cultural aspects were also explained, since, for example, the cultural area Mesoamerica may not be known to the target readers unless they are knowledgeable in anthropology or archaeology. This made the target text somewhat less formal than the original so, to compensate, the translation of the adverbial connectors however and thus were on occasion translated with the more formal Swedish emellertid and således.

TITLE: Greek and Latin medical terminology instruction in programmes of general medicine at medical schools in the Czech Republic and abroad. AUTHOR: Aleš Beran DEPARTMENT: Department of Education SUPERVISOR: doc. PhDr. Miroslava Váňová, CSc. ABSTRACT: The thesis seeks to provide a systematic description of the Greek and Latin medical terminology instruction at Czech and foreign medical schools. Its main objective is to build a platform for implementations of instructional innovations. In the first part of the thesis the medical terminology instruction in the Czech Republic is contextualized by giving a historical overview of development of medical terminology and dealing with origins of its instruction at the Faculty of General Medicine in Prague. The view of a present state of the instruction is completed by a profile of a typical medical student, which is based on the questionnaire. The next part of the thesis consists of detailed content analyses of selected Czech and foreign textbooks and their comparison. Based upon these analyses, an original typology of instructional models is set up which can be considered to be the most important theoretical outcome of the thesis. The typology is subsequently used as a tool for description of teaching medical terminology in Austria, Germany, United States, Canada,...

Toury’s first law of translation states that translation of all kinds entails standardisation and, moreover, that the more peripheral the status of a text is, the more standardised its translation will be. As such, the purpose of this essay was to investigate to what extent this holds true in the Swedish translations of the two US television hospital shows Scrubs and House M.D. Though they are both hospital shows, House M.D. – considering its unprecedented genre hybridity and unusual plot structure – is a less mainstream and, as such, more peripheral example of a hospital show than Scrubs, which is more mainstream and, consequently, has a more central position within this genre. The object of study concerned the genre-specific register shared by the two shows – i.e. the medical terminology – which was extracted together with its Swedish subtitles and analysed, mainly in terms of coupled pairs. The analysis consisted of identifying which translation strategies had been adopted in the transfer of terminology and, moreover, what these strategies had entailed in terms of semantic increase, decrease, or correspondence between the original texts and their translations. From this it was concluded that both texts were indeed standardised and, additionally, that House M.D. – as the more peripheral of the two texts – had undergone a more extensive standardisation than Scrubs – being the text holding a more central status.

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has been overseeing translations of the international clinical terminology SNOMED CT from English to Swedish. This study was performed to find whether semi-automatic methods of translation could produce a satisfactory translation while requiring fewer resources than manual translation. Using the medical English-Swedish dictionary TermColl translations of select subsets of SNOMED CT were produced by ways of translation memory and statistical translation. The resulting translations were evaluated via BLEU score using translations provided by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare as reference before being compared with each other. The results showed a strong advantage for statistical translation over use of a translation memory; however, overall translation results were far from satisfactory. / Den internationella kliniska terminologin SNOMED CT har översatts från engelska till svenska under ansvar av Socialstyrelsen. Den här studien utfördes för att påvisa om semiautomatiska översättningsmetoder skulle kunna utföra tillräckligt bra översättning med färre resurser än manuell översättning. Den engelsk-svenska medicinska ordlistan TermColl användes som bas för översättning av delmängder av SNOMED CT via översättnings­minne och genom statistisk översättning. Med Socialstyrelsens översättningar som referens poängsattes the semiautomatiska översättningarna via BLEU. Resultaten visade att statistisk översättning gav ett betydligt bättre resultat än översättning med översättningsminne, men över lag var resultaten alltför dåliga för att semiautomatisk översättning skulle kunna rekommenderas i detta fall.

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.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are used in Sweden's healthcare systems to store patients' medical information. Patients in Sweden have the right to access and read their health records. Unfortunately, the language used in EHRs is very complex and presents a challenge for readers who lack medical knowledge. Simplifying the language used in EHRs could facilitate the transfer of information between medical staff and patients. This project investigates the possibility of generating Swedish medical synonyms automatically. These synonyms are intended to be used in future systems for lexical simplification that can enhance the readability of Swedish EHRs and simplify medical terminology. Current publicly available Swedish corpora that provide synonyms for medical terminology are insufficient in size to be utilized in a system for lexical simplification. To overcome the obstacle of insufficient corpora, machine learning models are trained to generate synonyms and terms that convey medical concepts in a more understandable way. With the purpose of establishing a foundation for analyzing complex medical terms, a simple mechanism for Complex Word Identification (CWI) is implemented. The mechanism relies on matching strings and substrings from a pre-existing corpus containing hand-curated medical terms in Swedish. To find a suitable strategy for generating medical synonyms automatically, seven different machine learning models are queried for synonym suggestions for 50 complex sample terms. To explore the effect of different input data, we trained our models on different datasets with varying sizes. Three of the seven models are based on BERT and four of them are based on Word2Vec. For each model, results for the 50 complex sample terms are generated and raters with medical knowledge are asked to assess whether the automatically generated suggestions could be considered synonyms. The results vary between the different models and seem to be connected to the amount and quality of the data they have been trained on. Furthermore, the raters involved in judging the synonyms exhibit great disagreement, revealing the complexity and subjectivity of the task to find suitable and widely accepted medical synonyms. The method and models applied in this project do not succeed in creating a stable source of suitable synonyms. The chosen BERT approach based on Masked Language Modelling cannot reliably generate suitable synonyms due to the limitation of generating one term per synonym suggestion only. The Word2Vec models demonstrate some weaknesses due to the lack of context consideration. Despite the fact that the current performance of our models in generating automatic synonym suggestions is not entirely satisfactory, we have observed a promising number of accurate suggestions. This gives us reason to believe that with enhanced training and a larger amount of input data consisting of Swedish medical text, the models could be improved and eventually effectively applied.

This study focuses on the comparison of medical and health terms with special reference to Sesotho sa Leboa and Western languages. The study was conducted in the communities of Zebediela, Groblersdal and Marble Hall. From time immemorial, traditional medical and health terms were associated with certain types of diseases and health problems among Africans. With the introduction of Western civilisation, most of the medical and health terms which were used in the past by the Basotho ba Leboa, are no longer in use, as Western languages are regarded as prestige languages compared to the indigenous African languages. This perception led to a shortage of Sesotho sa Leboa documents that explain medical and health terms. The literature review revealed that traditional medicine is used for healing by many communities. Scholars further revealed that Western health terminology is more developed than traditional health terminology. The study uses the qualitative approach to explain concepts, and coding schemes were used to categorise medical and health terms. Ethnographic and historical theories were used to analyse data. The similarities and differences between the Sesotho sa Leboa terms and their Western counterparts were discussed and assessed. The study found that a relationship exists between diseases and the body parts in both Sesotho sa Leboa and Western terminology, and that the diseases were classified according to the affected body parts. The medical terms of both languages have similar and different semantic properties. Most of the differences were brought about by the cultural differences of the two communities. As the Sesotho sa Leboa medical terms are inimitable, the culture specific terms used in this study are discussed in Sesotho sa Leboa rather than in Western terminology. Conversely, as most of the recent outbreaks of diseases are named in Western terminology, they are translated into Sesotho sa Leboa. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)