A layman's view of medical translation.

Itr is notorious, asHenry vanHoof said, that medical and pharmaceutical language is the most incorrect and redundant, as well as the oldest, of all the scientific languages. The words used are the deposit of man's knowledge and superstition throughout the ages, with many hybrids built up opaquely from Greek (particularly pathology) and Latin (anatomy). Words like "anthrax" which sound foreign in any modern language still manage to have different and various meanings in the modern languages that have taken them over (splenic fever, anthrax, carbuncle). In psychiatry-, with its many divisions, practitioners will dispute definitions within a language; between languages, the dispute becomes compounded. Even suchterms as "chronic bronchitis" and "peptic ulcer'? have different meanings in English, French, and German-and schizophrenia is a law unto itself. The medical language register in European languages is a jungle of synonyms-different words being applied to the same condition, depending sometimes on whether the point of view is anatomical, clinical, or pathological, and sometimes on when and where the expression is used. Thus brucellosis has at least 25 (linguistic) synonyms in English alone (6-12 in other European languages). In 1973 Sliosberg again justified this chaos by stating that archaisms, "possibly considered as outdated by the younger generation, still often retain their value as basic documents," and he did not even try to distinguish them in his indispensable but inadequate dictionary. Add the notorious addiction to eponyms (Bruch's layer, Henle's membrane, and so on) resulting in several nations trying to appropriate the same test, reaction, condition, syndrome, or feature for one or more of their compatriots and, finally the universal craze for creating acronyms (not just to seek fame, but often because the writer is too lazy to repeat a multinoun compound), temporary or permanent (the French even use English medical ones like ACTH or turn a title Obliterations artirielles aigue's des membres into OAA), and one understands something of the difficulty facing a translator before he even starts. French doctors at