The Impact of Using the Translation Purpose on Translating Medical Terms

This paper studied the impact of using Hans J.Vermeer‟s Skopos theory in translating medical terms. Skopos is a theory takes in consideration the source and target texts but focuses on the purpose of translation which usually mentioned in the “Brief”.
Skopos theorist believed that professional translaros are able to establish a purpose of translation if they do not have a brief, and the brief of translation will affect their choices in translation strategies. The purpose of this study is to determine how medical translators act if they have a brief or not and if they are able to establish a purpose of translation based on the ST analysis also, if the translators translate oriented to the source text or to the target text.
Data of medical reports were collected from King Saud Medical City and problematic terms were studied on the light of Skopos theory, also, a questionnaire had been designed and distributed among KSMC translators to confirm the results of the reports analysis.
The results from the reports analysis showed that the reduction strategy was most used to translate the collected medical reports, and that the translators were target text oriented in general. I also determined that the translators used reduction strategy when they do not have a brief and tend to be target text oriented. Besides, translators used synonymy and reduction strategies equally when having a brief, although a translator who used the synonymy strategy tended to be source text-oriented and ignored the brief. When using the reduction strategy, translators were target text-oriented, which indicated that they considered the brief but as an overall, translator tend to ignore the brief when it defined the receivers as non-medical experts. The questionnaire results showed that translators believed that, the brief is essential to the translation process and it often has an impact on their selected TS. If the brief was not explicit, translators are capable to find a purpose of translation by keeping in mind ST and TT and they tend to be TT-oriented. This study will help to improve the
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production of medical translation as the receivres of TT vary between medical and non-medical experts.