“Ideas and tricks for medical language dissemination, its history and its stories.” Seminar given by Fernando Navarro (medical translator).

Summary:

Medical language, with twenty-five centuries of history behind it, has achieved a level of richness and complexity that is hardly fathomable to those looking at it from the outside, as it is unequalled by other specialised vocabularies, not to say the general language. In fact, the “Diccionario de la lengua española” (Dictionary of Spanish Language) of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) includes around 94 000 entries, while the current medical vocabulary should be around half a million of lexical units. Furthermore, it is not a fixed or concluded vocabulary, but one that varies and rapidly grows year after year, being constantly enriched thanks to the contributions of all the medical specialities.

At the end of 2005, José Ramón Zárate, deputy director of Diario Médico, offered me the possibility of publishing a weekly page in his newspaper, “Laboratorio del lenguaje” (“Laboratory of language”). It focuses on clarifying medical terms and how to correctly write them, with a variety of short excerpts about etymology, history, grammar questions, classic mistakes, translation flaws, terminological definitions, linguistic jokes and more. After seventeen years, the “Laboratorio” is still as active as on its first day. Several new posts are published each week and thousands of published articles are gathered in its archives. It has arrived to bookshops through six compilation volumes, as a collection with the generic title “Medicina en español” (Medicine in Spanish).

The aim of “Laboratorio” was, since the beginning, to bring the physicians closer to the delight of the language, to show them ―briefly, with just a few strokes― the beauty and the abundance of their own specialised language. But not only physicians and biosanitary professionals follow the page, but also translators of all kinds, medical redactors, style reviewers and scientific journalists.

Seventeen years of dissemination task have allowed me to think about the most useful resources and tricks for achieving an efficient dissemination of all kinds of content, especially the ones related to language and its history.