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")

medical slang ukrainian translation

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].

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.

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.

Analysis Procedure.

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):

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.

Example 2.

Панкреатит має ще декілька причин. Приємно що їх усіх можна запамя- тати за допомогою фрази

GET SMASHED (налижися до дідька)

Лікарня наполягає, щоб такі випадки, як цей великий гаплик з нирками, більше не повторювались.

“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.

Fig. 3. The result for the query of the slang unit “mess” in the Ukrainian-language subcorpus

Example 3.

He was Transferred Перевели його на п'ятнадця- to the fifteenth floor. тий поверх - пацієнт помер.

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.

References

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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

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