Análisis Contrastivo (Inglès-Español) del Libro de Texto de Medicina e Implicaciones Didácticas para la Formación de Traductores.

Abstract

Medical textbooks are used as a pedagogical tool in the training of medical translators from English into Spanish. However, researchers have paid little attention from a contrastive perspective to this genre—of crucial importance for translation didactics. Based on the contrastive analysis of 13 textbooks in the field of medicine (5 in English, 8 in Spanish), this paper has the following objectives: (1) to study a set of text-external features (the prominent communicative function of the text, speech acts, communicative partners, text reception and production; (2) to study textinternal features—metacommunicative strategies that provide useful information about how writers alleviate the addressee’s reception of the information conveyed in the text, build a relationship with readers and show how the genre “textbook” presents specialist knowledge in a didactic way; (3) to show how the results obtained may contribute to planning and defining learning objectives for the training of medical translators according to didactic criteria.