Eponymous designations in popularising medical texts - a contrastive German-Portuguese study
Keywords:
medical eponyms, languages for special purposes, medical vulgarisation, German-PortugueseAbstract
In the field of medical language, the designation of diseases, as well as anatomical designations, therapeutic methods and devices used to treat patients, has always been marked by the use of eponyms, metaphors and metonyms. Several studies (Montalt & González-Davies, 2007; Ferguson & Thomas, 2014, among others) report translation problems caused by a different use of these designations in a given language pair. Based on these issues, the present study aims to analyse and contrast the use of eponyms and metaphors in medical language in the language pair German-Portuguese. The aim of the study is to identify and analyse eponyms in medical texts by using comparable corpora. In a first instance, the corpora were compiled from texts belonging to medical websites for the general public. The German corpus consists of 123 026 tokens and the Portuguese corpus of 150 323 tokens. On the basis of the corpora, eponyms were extracted and analysed according to their linguistic features. The analysis resulted in a comparison of the eponyms used in both languages. The study aims to contribute to research in Languages for Special Purposes on the vulgarisation of medical language.
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