CORPUS LINGUISTICS AS A TOOL TO SUPPORT TRANSLATION AND TEACHING OF ENGLISH FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES

Abstract

Among the many varieties of specialized language (technical, legal, academic, hotel, etc.), medical language is undoubtedly one of the most challenging to master. The aim of this article is to analyze the use of linguistic corpora in the field of medical English (English for Medical Purposes, EMP), specifically in teaching medical English, teaching medical translation, assisting translators in visualizing medical texts, and assisting authors in writing medical academic texts. A range of corpus linguistic tools and data analysis techniques are presented, including automatic term extraction, data visualization, collocation and tag analysis, and the use of regular expressions and lexical clusters. These tools can be useful to physicians and researchers representing sciences related to medicine when translating such texts by linguists, translators, as well as when teaching medical English at a medical university (as part of a foreign language course) and in graduate school in the field of medical translation. The prospect of further research may be the creation of linguistic corpora based on texts on oncology from the corpus of DOAJ journals.