TriMED: A Multilingual Terminological Database

Abstract

Three precise categories of people are confronted with the complexity of medical language: physicians, patients and scientific translators. The purpose of this work is to develop a methodology for the implementation of a terminological tool that contributes to solve problems related to the opacity that characterizes communication in the medical field among its various actors. The main goals are: i) satisfy the peer-to-peer communication, ii) facilitate the comprehension of medical information by patients, and iii) provide a regularly updated resource for scientific translators. We illustrate our methodology and its application through the description of a multilingual terminological-phraseological resource named TriMED. This terminological database will consist of records designed to create a terminological bridge between the various registers (specialist, semi-specialist, non-specialist) as well as across the languages considered. In this initial analysis, we restricted to the field of breast cancer, and the terms to be analyzed will be extracted from a corpus in English, accompanied by all relevant linguistic information and properties, and re-attached to their pragmatic equivalent in Italian and French.

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