Peculiarities of medical slang translation into Ukrainian: corpus-based approach (on the material of Adam Kay's book "This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor")
Analysis of the peculiarities of the translation of units of medical slang into the Ukrainian language using a corpus-based approach. Adam Kay's book "This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor" served as the source base for the research.
| Рубрика | Иностранные языки и языкознание |
| Вид | статья |
| Язык | английский |
| Дата добавления | 21.03.2023 |
| Размер файла | 1,9 M |
Отправить свою хорошую работу в базу знаний просто. Используйте форму, расположенную ниже
Студенты, аспиранты, молодые ученые, использующие базу знаний в своей учебе и работе, будут вам очень благодарны.
Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/
Peculiarities of medical slang translation into Ukrainian: corpus-based approach (on the material of Adam Kay's book "This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor")
Myskiv Yu.Yu.,
Master of Arts at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Lviv National Polytechnic University
Taran O.S.,
Ph. D in Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics Lviv National Polytechnic University
Peculiarities of medical slang translation into Ukrainian: corpus-based approach (on the material of Adam Kay's book "This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor")
The article is devoted to analysis of medical slang translation peculiarities into Ukrainian using a corpus-based approach. Lexical units that are actively used in medical discourse but do not belong to medical terminological systems and are characterized by stylistic depreciation can be defined as a "medical slang".
Adam Kay's book "This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor" (2017) was chosen as a material for our study. The translation into Ukrainian was made by Andrii Lapin, the book was titled "Таємні щоденники лікаря-ордина- тора" (2020).
The study involved several stages: creation of a parallel corpus using Sketch Engine tools, identification of medical slang units in the English sub-corpus and analysis of their translation in a parallel concordance.
Step-by step algorithm of parallel corpus compilation with the Sketch Engine tools is described in the article. This software allows users to create both monolingual and parallel corpora, observe the collocational behavior of linguistic units in them, and study their frequency and statistical parameters. Also, an automatic extraction of slang units from the corpus was described. The Keywords function allows to automate extraction. EnTenTen2020 corpus was chosen as the reference corpus. As a result, we received a list of low-frequency words, from which 18 units of medical slang were manually sorted. Each slang unit was entered into a search in a parallel concordance and received a translation in context.
The translation of medical slang was rendered by the translator using the following methods: calque translation combined with descriptive translation, transcoding of acronyms also combined with description, word-for word rendering without additional implication, contextual replacement. The most productive method in this case was calque translation with description in parenthesis.
Key words: parallel corpus, Sketch Engine, medical slang, translation, text.
ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ПЕРЕКЛАДУ МЕДИЧНОГО СЛЕНГУ УКРАЇНСЬКОЮ МОВОЮ: КОРПУСНИЙ ПІДХІД (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ КНИГИ АДАМА КЕЯ "ЦЕ БУДЕ БОЛЯЧЕ: ТАЄМНІ ЩОДЕННИКИ МОЛОДШОГО ЛІКАРЯ")
Стаття присвячена аналізу особливостей перекладу одиниць медичного сленгу українською мовою із застосуванням корпуснобазованого підходу. Лексичні одиниці, які активно вживаються в медичному дискурсі, але не належать до медичних термінологічних систем і характеризуються стилістичним зниженням, визначаємо як "медичний сленг".
Джерельною базою дослідження послугувала книга Адама Кея "This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor" (2017). Переклад українською мовою здійснив Андрій Лапін, твір отримав назву "Таємні щоденники лікаря- ординатора" (2020). translation medical slang
Дослідження передбачало кілька етапів: створення паралельного корпусу за допомогою інструментів Sketch Engine, виявлення одиниць медичного сленгу в англійському підкорпусі та аналіз їх перекладу в паралельному конкордансі.
У статті описано покроковий алгоритм створення паралельного корпусу за допомогою інструментів Sketch Engine. Це програмне забезпечення дозволяє створювати як одномовні, так і паралельні корпуси, спостерігати за колокаційною поведінкою лінгвістичних одиниць, вивчати їх частотність і статистичні параметри. У статті також описано автоматичне вилучення сленгових одиниць із англійськомовного підкорпусу. Функція Keywords дозволяє автоматизувати вилучення. Корпус EnTenTen2020 був обраний як референтний корпус. У результаті було отримано список низькочастотних слів, з якого вручну відсортовано 18 одиниць медичного сленгу. Кожна сленгова одиниця вводилася в пошук у паралельному конкордансі, далі ми отримували переклад у контексті.
Переклад одиниць медичного сленгу здійснено перекладачем за допомогою таких методів: калькування в поєднанні з описовим перекладом, транскодування акронімів у поєднанні з описовим методом, дослівний переклад без додаткового пояснення, контекстуальна заміна. Найпродуктивнішим прийомом у Андрія Лапіна був переклад методом калькування з описом у дужках.
Ключові слова: паралельний корпус, Sketch Engine, медичний сленг, переклад, текст.
Problem statement. The characteristic peculiarity of the language of medicine, like of the any language for special purposes, is heterogeneous structure of its lexical composition and stylistic divergence. In order to denote lexical units that are actively used in medical discourse but do not belong to medical terminological systems and are characterized by stylistic depreciation can be used the term "medical slang". It should be noted that there are various ambiguous definitions of the term "slang". The concept of "slang" is often combined with the concept of "jargon" due to the fact that the contents of these terms are very close.
Doctor's (medical) slang/jargon is defined as "an uncodified type of oral speech of doctors, the basis of which is professional jargon and argotism" [2, p. 136]. The growing numbers of medical slang show us that this special terminology forms an integral part of language use. Medical slang is a clear example of the widespread use of non-standard words and expressions related to a certain professional activity. Its essence consists of the usage of humorous acronyms that are sometimes provocative in the pronunciation, and fictional terms to describe patients, colleagues, or non-specific situations. In other words, medical slang acts as a convenient but sometimes cynical speech code between doctors and other hospital staff. The purpose of using medical slang is to save time and effort, show the expressiveness and wit of language, and demonstrate awareness in the professional field. Medical slang exists in many languages, but in English-speaking countries, it has entered the general culture thanks to television series about doctors and forensic experts [1, p. 23].
Overview of resources and tools. The English medical slang was studied and analyzed in the works of A. Fox, J. Dirckx, etc. In Ukrainian studies, the works of A. Marlova & L. Dudikova, O. Hryshyna, V. Chernenko on this topic should be mentioned.
Special attention should be paid to studies of medical slang in literary works in general present in the work of R. Coombs and in the translation studies aspect in particular by D. Lozano, M. Shevchenko, etc. For the research of both aspects, the corpus approach is relevant, which, however, is still not actively used in Ukrainian linguistics. The absence of parallel corpora of the Ukrainian language caused unpopularity of the corpus approach in translation studies.
Parallel corpora are corpora consisting of texts together with their translation into one or more languages. They can be used directly as translation aids for humans, or can provide input for automatic inductive translation resources for vocabulary and machine translation software [8, p. 130].
NLP tools. Compilation of an English-Ukrainian parallel corpus for the purpose of text translation analysis is possible with the help of various programs and tools, among which is AntPConc. It is a free corpus analysis toolkit for text matching and analysis using text files in UTF-8 encoding [4]. This tool allows to create a parallel corpus from two or more aligned raw text files using the Corpus Builder feature. In this program, user can download raw text files, each line of which must be aligned with each line of other text files, then you need to specify the name of our corpora, and with the help of the Update Corpus option, the internal database of the built parallel corpus will be obtained.
In addition to building a new corpus, this software has a number of other functions such as: saving an already constructed parallel corpus, loading an already constructed parallel corpus, editing an already constructed parallel corpus, searching the parallel corpus.
However, the Sketch Engine software, developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., has greater functionality in creating and further analyzing a parallel corpus since 2003 [3]. This software allows user to create both monolingual and parallel corpora, observe the collocational behavior of linguistic units in them, and study their frequency and statistical parameters. Sketch Engine gets its name from one of its key features, word sketches: single-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behavior [6, p. 10-12].
Problem setting. The book "This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor" (2017) by the British comedy writer and former doctor Adam Kay was chosen as a material for our analysis. "This is Going to Hurt..." is composed of diary notes Adam Kay wrote during his medical training under the National Health Service. The genre of the book is nonfiction, but despite this, the style is somewhere informal, with humor, irony, bright metaphors, and other stylistic devices, which compose a large layer of medical vocabulary - slang. However, the theme of the writing is definitely medicine. Therefore, the main task for the translator was to preserve all details concerning the medical topic, vocabulary, and terminology. One more challenging peculiarity of this work was to render the terminology of the British medical system in the understandable for target audience way, which means the addition of further explanations when needed.
The translation into Ukrainian was made by Andrii Lapin, the book was titled "Таємні щоденники лікаря-ординатора" (2020).
The purpose of this study is to analyze the peculiarities of medical slang translation using a corpus-based approach. The study involved several stages: creation of a parallel corpus using Sketch Engine tools, identification of medical slang units in the English sub-corpus and analysis of their translation in a parallel concordance.
Analysis Procedure.
1. Creation of a parallel corpus in Sketch Engine.
Corpus creation involves pre-corpus preparation of texts - original and translation, which included a set of information procedures that make the texts suitable for work in the corpus manager, namely: removal of unnecessary graphic components, metatext information, as well as page and chapter numbering.
The next stage is the parsing of the prepared texts by Sketch Engine tools using the CQL query <s/>, as a result of which we get a concordance with the text parsed into sentences, which can be downloaded as *xlsx for further processing in Excel. So, at this stage, we received 2 files from which redundant metatext information, which is written automatically during parsing, was removed.
To create a parallel corpus, it is necessary to have an Excel file with aligned texts - English and Ukrainian. This step involved manually checking the automatic alignment. This process is quite tedious and requires lengthy editing due to differences in sentence construction in the original and translated languages.
For example, in Fig. 1 we see that a complex construction in the original language is represented as two separate sentences, complex and simple. In the target language, two separate sentences were also used, nevertheless, the translator chose two complex sentences and articulated the fragment differently, so that the sentences of the original and the translation are not equivalent. In this case, to create a parallel corpus, we are forced to combine this construction to preserve parallelism and equivalence.
The next peculiarity that created difficulties were the author's notes, and accordingly their translation, since their location in the text and markings were different. After the previous steps, we received an aligned and edited Excel spreadsheet, which will serve as the basis for our corpus, containing 3074 aligned lines.
The resulting consolidated file was used to create a bilingual English-Ukrainian text corpus of Adam Kay (Fig. 2):
Each language in the output file will be processed as a separate monolingual corpus and matched with the corresponding corpus in the other language. The Parallel Concordance function allows working with both subcorpora (Fig. 3).
2. Automatic extraction of slang units from the corpus. In order to be able to analyze the ways of translating medical slang units in the parallel corpus, we need to obtain a list of slang units in the English subcorpus. For this, we used the method, described for occasional vocabulary [7] as it is also suitable for extracting slang vocabulary, because in both cases it is passive vocabulary that will be of low frequency in the reference corpus. The Keywords function allows to automate extraction. We chose enTenTen2020 as the reference corpus. As a result, we received a list of low-frequency words, from which 18 units of medical slang were manually sorted. Each slang unit was entered into a search in a parallel concordance and received a translation in context.
3. Translation peculiarities of medical slang units. Slang units are formed by the same means as in the standard language, namely by word shortening, word combination, and the formation of acronyms or abbreviations.
Despite the prevalence of medical terms in the analyzed book, medical slang is represented there as well. The following aim is to estimate the level of translation from the perspective of accuracy and expressivity. Let's analyze examples.
Fig. 1. Alignment of texts for a parallel corpus
Fig. 2. The stage of creating a bilingual corpus on Sketch Engine
Fig. 3. The result for the query of the slang unit "mess" in the Ukrainian-language subcorpus
Example 1.
|
Most of these patients suffer from Eiffel Syndrome - `I fell, doctor! I fell!' |
Більшість таких паці- ентів слабують на синдром Ейфеля - ("Лікарю, я впав! Присягаюся) |
In this line author use a popular British example of medical slang "Eiffel Syndrome" and provide a short descriptive note "I fell, doctor! I fell!'". Investigation of this phrase shows that this slang stands for the transcription of expression "I fell syndrome". This slang phrase denotes the patient with a foreign object in the rectum. The approach to translation of this phrase was obviously calque translation, while the expressiveness is lost in the target extract. The expression is rendered as a simple eponym, where Eiffel stands for the surname. The description is as well rendered word-for-word, and as a result readers have no idea about the origins of this slang and text lose its stylistic expressiveness and colloquial vocabulary.
Example 2.
|
The hospital is very keen mistakes like the great kidney snafu aren't repeated. |
Лікарня наполягає, щоб такі випадки, як цей великий гаплик з нирками, більше не повторювались. |
This extract provides the reader with a quite interesting phrase "kidney snafu". Word "snafu" is a non-standard vocabulary of English language, it originates from the acronym to the slang phrase: "situation normal: all fouled up". However, now it is used in different spheres, including medicine, as a non-standard or slang expression denoting "a situation marked by errors or confusion" [5]. This phrase was translated by Andriy Lapin with Ukrainian slang unit "гаплик", which is similar to the denotative meaning of the original and has expressive stylistic colouring to provide colloquial, informal language. Translator used the best suitable approach and rendered the sense and style of the source line.
Example 3.
|
He was Transferred to the fifteenth floor. |
Перевели його на п'ятнадцятий поверх - пацієнт помер. |
In the given sentence the author used a vivid example of the medical slang, used in hospitals. Translator provided the literary translation of the phrase, even though it is not understandable for the target audience, but he added the explanation of this phrase. In the process slang lost all its functions - expressiveness, colloquial tone, representation of professional medical atmosphere. This example of slang in the source language medical discourse means "the patient is dead (the number should be one higher than the number of floors in the hospital)". In Ukrainian discourse it makes no sense and without explanation it would not be clear. However, even with explanation, it would be better idea to look for some informal equivalents in the target language to preserve the informality of the tone.
Example 4.
|
There are a number of other causes of pancreatitis, and the mnemonic for remembering them, pleasingly, is GET SMASHED. |
Панкреатит має щє декілька причин. Приємно що їх усіх можна запамя- тати за допомогою фрази GET SMASHED (налижися до дідька) |
In the original line the slang acronym is presented. As we know acronyms are one of the biggest slang group in the English non-standard language, and at the same time the most complicated and challenging for translator. Acronym "GET SMASHED" is used to enumerate the major causes of pancreatitis and stands for Gallstones, Ethanol, Trauma, Steroids, Mumps, malignancy (Pancreatic cancer), Autoimmune, Scorpion sting, Hypercalcaemia, Hypertriglyceridemia, ERCP, Drugs. This acronym is used in non-official conversations, usually between doctors, and is used in the book to emphasize the informal situation. Translator decided to leave the English acronym, he did not combine it with descriptive method, which would provide comprehensive information for the reader. Moreover, the additional information in brackets was added, which is the another non-standard definition for the phrase "get smashed" - "the excessive intake of alcohol enough to become intoxicated and nearly pass out. The translation of this meaning is accurate in terms of style and content. It seems that this addition is unnecessary, but on the other hand, it compensates the absence of proper translation of the acronym and maintains informal tone.
Conclusions
To conclude, the translation of medical slang was rendered by the translator using the following methods: calque translation combined with descriptive translation, transcoding of acronyms also combined with description, word- for word rendering without additional implication, contextual replacement. The most productive method in this case was calque translation with description in parenthesis. Next widely used technique was transcoding of the acronym with the description of its components. Contextual replacement was used occasionally, when the stylistically and connotatively equivalent notion was found in target language. The least productive way of translation in analyzed material was found to be bare word-for-word rendering, as it is inappropriate in terms in full conveying of source language sense and expressiveness.
References
1. Дудікова Л., Марлова А. Особливості англійського медичного сленгу та ознайомлення з ним студентів вищих медичних навчальних закладів як засіб мотивування до вивчення іноземної мови. Молодь і ринок. 2018. №. 9. С. 22-27.
2. Юкало В.Я. Мовні стереотипи в комунікаціях лікаря: Дис... канд. філол. наук. К.: НАН України; Інститут мовознавства ім. О.О. Потебні, 2003. 207 с.
3. Sketch Engine. Lexical Computing s.r.o. Retrieved September 30, 2022. URL: https://www.sketchengine.eu/
4. Anthony L. AntConc (Version 4.1.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University, 2022. URL: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software
5. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. URL: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary (retrieved September 30, 2022).
6. Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Busta, J. et al. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography ASIALEX. 2014. V. 1. № 1. С. 7-36. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9.
7. Taran О., Palchevska O., Luchyk А., Shabunina V., Labenko O. Stylometric Study of the Fiction Using Sketch Engine. DHW 2021: Digital Humanities Workshop (December 2021). ACM DL, 2021. Р 63-69. URL: https://doi. org/10.1145/3526242.3526249
8. von Waldenfels R. Compiling a parallel corpus of Slavic languages. Text strategies, tools and the question of lemmatization in alignment. Beitrage der europaischen slavistischen Linguistik (POLYSLAV). 2006. V. 9. P. 123-138.
Размещено на Allbest.ru
...Подобные документы
Consideration of the problem of the translation of the texts of the maritime industry. An analysis of modern English marine terms, the peculiarities of the use of these techniques in the translation of marine concepts from English into Ukrainian.
статья [37,5 K], добавлен 24.04.2018Translation as communication of meaning of the original language of the text by the text equivalent of the target language. The essence main types of translation. Specialized general, medical, technical, literary, scientific translation/interpretation.
презентация [1,3 M], добавлен 21.11.2015Translation as a specific kind of human activity. Methods, approaches and receptions which can be applied while translating informal lexicon. Euphemism and it's using in language of advertising, in slang and in a professional slang in languages.
реферат [30,7 K], добавлен 20.05.2009Peculiarities of slang development and functioning in the historical prospective. Specific features of slang use, identify slang origin. Specify chat slang categories. Studies on the use of different types of jargon in the speech of the youth of today.
дипломная работа [57,8 K], добавлен 13.11.2015Main ways of the creating slang expressions. Varieties of British slang: rhyming slang; back slang; polari. Slang as the main reason for the development of prescriptive language in an attempt to slow down the rate of change in spoken and written language.
статья [8,3 K], добавлен 28.05.2009The structure and purpose of the council of Europe. The structural and semantic features of the texts of the Council of Europe official documents. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the translation of a document from English to ukrainian language.
курсовая работа [39,4 K], добавлен 01.05.2012Comparative analysis of acronyms in English business registers: spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, non-academic, misc. Productivity acronyms as the most difficult problem in translation. The frequency of acronym formation in British National Corpus.
курсовая работа [145,5 K], добавлен 01.03.2015Characteristic features of Slang. Feature Articles: Magical, Ritual, Language and Trench Slang of the Western front. Background of Cockney English. Slang Lexicographers. The Bloomsbury Dictionary Of Contemporary slang. Slang at the Millennium.
курсовая работа [69,2 K], добавлен 21.01.2008The lessons of reading and translation of different texts and word-combinations into Ukrainian. The most frequently used expressions with the verbs to be, to have and sentences with them. Reading and translation the dialogue used in the usual speech.
учебное пособие [89,2 K], добавлен 25.03.2010Exploring the concept and the subject matter of toponymy. Translation of place names from English to Ukrainian. The role of names in linguistic, archaeological and historical research. Semantic and lexical structure of complex geographical names.
курсовая работа [50,1 K], добавлен 30.05.2014Development of translation notion in linguistics. Types of translation. Lexical and grammatical peculiarities of scientific-technical texts. The characteristic of the scientific, technical language. Analysis of terminology in scientific-technical style.
курсовая работа [41,5 K], добавлен 26.10.2010Definition of concept of slangy language. Consideration of the reasons of occurrence, history of an origin, phonetic peculiarities, morphological characteristics and types of slang (from the Internet, of army, police, money, cockeney rhyming, polary).
курсовая работа [77,9 K], добавлен 06.02.2010The peculiarities in texts of business documents, problems of their translation, interpretation and analysis of essential clauses. The main features of formal English as the language of business papers: stylistic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities.
дипломная работа [70,2 K], добавлен 05.07.2011Peculiarities of asyndetic noun clusters in economic texts. Specific to translation of asyndetic noun clusters as the specific kind of the word from English into Ukrainian. Transformations, applied to asyndetic noun clusters in the process of translation.
презентация [22,5 K], добавлен 06.12.2015The place and role of contrastive analysis in linguistics. Analysis and lexicology, translation studies. Word formation, compounding in Ukrainian and English language. Noun plus adjective, adjective plus adjective, preposition and past participle.
курсовая работа [34,5 K], добавлен 13.05.2013The necessity of description of compound adjectives in the English and the Ukrainian languages in respect of their contrastive analysis. The differences and similarities in their internal structure and meaning of translation of compound adjectives.
курсовая работа [39,0 K], добавлен 10.04.2013Study of lexical and morphological differences of the women’s and men’s language; grammatical forms of verbs according to the sex of the speaker. Peculiarities of women’s and men’s language and the linguistic behavior of men and women across languages.
дипломная работа [73,0 K], добавлен 28.01.2014Concept, essence, aspects, methods and forms of oral translation. Current machine translation software, his significance, types and examples. The nature of translation and human language. The visibility of audiovisual translation - subtitling and dubbing.
реферат [68,3 K], добавлен 15.11.2009Defining the notion "slang"; origins, sources and diffusion. Spoken English and Slang. Tracing the origin and sources of slang. Singling out the classification, forms and characteristics of slang; аnalyzing the its use. The Cockney language and Polari.
курсовая работа [54,4 K], добавлен 07.07.2015Defining the notion "slang". Analyzing the use of slang in movies, literature, songs and Internet. Interviewing native American speakers. Singling out the classification of slang, its forms and characteristics. Tracing the origin and sources of slang.
курсовая работа [73,6 K], добавлен 23.07.2015
