Informed decision making in translating assessment scales in Physical Therapy

Abstract

This article focuses on medical translation as a timely and accurate transfer of scientific knowledge and practical information alike and as a way of transforming knowledge into action. More specifically, it delves into the mechanisms underlying informed decision making in translating assessment scales in Physical Therapy. The main challenge lies in achieving precision and accuracy when dealing with this text type (assessment scales are medical documents bordering informative and vocative categories) and, especially, with the extremely dense and, in many cases, ambiguous terminology. We aim to work out a conceptual and methodological toolkit for medical terminology management and standardization, with a special focus on the language pair English–Romanian, while also raising awareness of the need for building relevant corpora and making them available for medical translators in order to boost their productivity and the translation quality. The examination of the principles of specialized corpus design and use (parallel corpora) is done in correlation with the development of the medical translator’s competence, comprising the ability to retrieve grammatical, lexical, terminological, and stylistic equivalents.