RENDERING MEDICAL CONCEPTS IN THE POPULAR SCIENTIFIC NON-FICTION

Abstract

The presented study deals with rendering medical concepts in the popular scientific non-fiction. The study is based on “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ” by Giulia Enders (translated in Ukrainian by K. Menshykova), which is aimed towards raising accessibility of the highlyspecialized medical information for the wide range of readers with no medical education. The book by G. Enders is a typical transgenre, i. e. a discourse obtaining new functions via translation (the original is written in German, while the Ukrainian version has visible traces of the English interference). The attention is focused on intra- and interlinguistic hybridity attending the fulfilment of informative function of the popular scientific medical discourses in translation. The study is aimed at proving the research hypothesis on whether the rendering of medical concepts requires a range of procedures (tactics) bordering on, though not fully overlapping with, those used for retranslating the sense of medical terms and notions. The contrastive translation analysis results in a set of generalized conclusions on the requirements made towards distinguishing the rendered medical concepts from terms and notions. There is a specified definitive fallacy produced by the terminological interference of the English language-derived “concept”, which precludes correct understanding of biomedical concepts’ nature and functions, i. e. provenance from the target health literacy and a vivid culture-specific coloring, and differs them from terms and notions. Based on the above-mentioned definition, there are two groups of translation strategies, which may be applied to reproducing medical concepts in the popular scientific non-fiction. The conceptualreferential approach implies focusing on the concept’s ethnospecific features, i. e. directing the translator towards foreignization/domestication strategies. The practical approach implies focusing on the use of translation tactics (transformations), i. e. directing the translator towards reproductive, adaptive strategies, or frequent combinations of such.