Medical Translation Competences: Translation Agencies Highlighting Quality

Abstract

Medical language can be considered a specialized language as it contains domain-specific characteristics, such as terminology and phrases established inside the field. In addition, the complexity of medical communication is highlighted by, for example, various medical specialties, genres, sub-genres and registers. Thus, translating medical language requires specific knowledge, skills and abilities, which can be defined as medical translation competences. However, achieving these competences is left to the person interested in medical translation, as translators aren’t required to have any background in medicine or healthcare. Also, there is no official competence framework for the specific field to guide aspiring future medical translators, even though previous research on the subject has been conducted, mainly from the point of view of education on medical translation. The aim of this thesis was to explore medical translation competences presented by translation agencies’ Finnish webpages. Medical translation competences were examined according to the European Commission’s competence framework for translators as knowledge, skills and abilities. The research questions were: what kind of competences are required in medical translation according to translation agencies, and are there similarities compared to previously presented medical translation competences? The data for this thesis consisted of 23 translation agencies’ Finnish webpages on medical translation. The webpages included in the data had a word-count ranging from 40 to 835 words, with titles such as medicine and biotechnology. The data was analysed using thematic analysis. The following themes were found in the analysis: medical language, medical specialization, quality management, and intra- and interpersonal skills. The themes containing specific medical translation competences were medical language and medical specialization. However, all of the themes consisted of both specific competences and general ones. In the comparison of the data and previous research, many similarities but also some discrepancies were noted. The most notable difference between the two was the specificity of some of the presented competences – for example, terminology was mentioned as a general concept in the data and explained in detail in previous research.