Beliefs, attitudes and expectations on how to translate medical and biomedical content: the perspective of the novice translator

Abstract

In contrast to medical interpreting, there is much less information on translators’ beliefs about how to translate written medical content and how these beliefs differ from the translation preferences and expectations of health professionals. Investigating translators’ beliefs is nevertheless important if we want a more nuanced understanding of how translators’ choices are influenced by how they believe they should translate and what they believe health professionals expect from them. Adopting a sociological and philosophical approach to the study of expectations, this paper reports on the findings from a survey investigating novice translators’ beliefs about medical and biomedical translation from English to European Portuguese. The data suggests that translators’ beliefs about how they think they should translate do not coincide with their expectations about how readers believe they should translate. The research results represent a further step towards a fuller picture of the role of expectations about medical translation, as well as having implications for translators' training.