Тranslating Medical Terminology: Strategies for Translating Covid-19 Terms from English into Macedonian

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Sonja Kitanovska-Kimovska
Silvana Neškovska

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the vocabulary used to talk about the COVID-19 situation in the Macedonian public space. For the purposes of this study a corpus of 130 Covid-19-related terms in English and their Macedonian counterparts was compiled. The English terms were extracted from the COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 Multilingual Terminology Collection found in the European Union terminology database (IATE), as well as other relevant COVID-19 glossaries. Their Macedonian counterparts were extracted from various public sources of information. The analysis is based on Vinay and Darbalnet’s (1958/1995 in Venuti 2000) model of translation strategies, complemented by some of Molina and Hurtado Albir’s translation techniques (2002). The analysis shows which translation strategies are used to convey COVID-19-related terms into Macedonian and how the terms relate to different audiences. The results stress the importance of conscious and effortful control over terminology adoption and creation.

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How to Cite
Kitanovska-Kimovska, Sonja, and Silvana Neškovska. 2022. “Тranslating Medical Terminology: Strategies for Translating Covid-19 Terms from English into Macedonian”. Journal of Contemporary Philology 5 (1), 39–57. https://doi.org/10.37834/JCP2251039kk.
Section
Linguistics

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Glossary resources

COVID-19 Multilingual Terminology Available in IATE. Available at http://cdt.europa.eu/sites/default/files/iate-covid-terminology_export_en-29-04-20.xlsx.
COVID Term, Terminology System for COVID-19 of the Institute of Medical Information, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Available at http://covidterm.imicams.ac.cn/#/welcome.
TERMIUM Plus, Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemic of the Government of Canada. Available at https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/publications/covid19-eng.html.
Translators without Borders’ COVID-19 Glossary. Available at https://glossaries.translatorswb.org/covid19/.