28.79, Review: English; Polish; Slovak; Spanish; Turkish; Semantics; Translation: Panocová, Hacken (2015)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-79. Wed Jan 04 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 28.79, Review: English; Polish; Slovak; Spanish; Turkish; Semantics; Translation: Panocová, Hacken (2015)
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Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2017 18:12:03
From: Bruno Maroneze [maronezebruno at yahoo.com.br]
Subject: Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-371.html
EDITOR: Pius Ten Hacken
EDITOR: Renáta Panocová
TITLE: Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Bruno O. Maroneze, Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
“Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English”, edited by Pius ten
Hacken and Renáta Panocová, contains eight contributions (besides an
introduction) on medical terminology in English, divided in two parts: the
first four chapters with a monolingual perspective, and the last four dealing
with translation issues. As one reads in the introduction, most contributions
“are based on presentations at the Seminar ‘Word formation and transparency in
Medical English’, organized by the editors at the 12th Conference of the
European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Košice” (p. 10).
Medical language use is an important research field within current
Linguistics, comprising studies on doctor-patient interactions and on
morphological and lexical matters (as treated in this book). In the
introduction, the editors explain what they understand by ‘Medical English’,
‘Word Formation’ and ‘Transparency’, concepts that will be important in most
(if not all) the chapters. In particular, transparency is opposed to
motivation and iconicity: “The degree of motivation concerns the extent to
which the SPEAKER [emphasis added] is guided to use this expression for the
instrument it refers to” (p. 7), while “[t]he degree of transparency concerns
the extent to which the READER or HEARER [emphasis added] is helped by the
form in the task of determining the meaning” (p. 7). Iconicity is the idea
that “more complex concepts have longer names” (p. 7), and is independent of
speaker and hearer.
In Chapter One, entitled ‘Taxonomy and Transparency in International
Pharmaceutical Nomenclature’, Rachel Bryan describes the naming system
employed by the World Health Organization in creating International
Nonproprietary Names (INN). After this thorough description, the author
discusses the importance of transparency in this system.
Chapter Two is entitled ‘Term Variation in the Psychiatric Domain:
Transparency and Multidimensionality’, by Pilar León-Araúz. The author
correlates term variation and transparency in a collection of terms denoting
psychiatric conditions, showing that variants activate different motivating
dimensions, like ‘discoverer’, ‘symptom’, ‘cause’, and ‘result’.
Pius ten Hacken, in Chapter Three (‘Naming Devices in Middle-Ear Surgery: a
Morphological Analysis’), correlates morphological structure and transparency
in a collection of terms from the domain of middle-ear surgery. He emphasizes
the distinction between transparency and motivation, relating transparency to
Jackendoff’s (1975) redundancy rules, and showing possible correspondences
between transparency and compounding structures. Also emphasized is the
importance of domain knowledge in the evaluation of transparency.
Chapter Four, ‘Transparency and Use of Neoclassical Word Formation in Medical
English’, by Renáta Panocová, also deals with the correlation between
transparency and morphology, but focuses on neoclassical word formation. She
proposes a continuum of transparency: neoclassical terms are the most
transparent structure, followed closely by their English equivalents;
abbreviations and, lastly, eponyms are less transparent.
The last four chapters deal with English in comparison to other languages. In
Chapter Five (‘Transparency of Nominal Compounds in Medical English: Problems
in their Translation into Spanish and Slovak’, by Nina Patton, María Fernández
Parra and Rocío Pérez Tattam), the authors propose a semantic categorization
for Noun + Noun (N + N) compounds in English and then try to correlate these
categories to the way each compound is translated into Spanish and Slovak.
“The results seem to suggest that there is a link between the semantic
relation of the English compound and the syntactic structure of the
translation” (p. 119).
Chapter six (‘Word Formation Strategies in Translated Popular Medical Texts in
Turkey’, by Sevda Pekcoşkun) also focuses heavily on translation issues,
specifically on the issue of translating popular medical texts. Borrowing is
the most used translation procedure in the studied corpus. An online survey
also was used to identify the reception of the translations by the general
public.
The last two chapters deal with English in comparison to Polish. Chapter Seven
(‘Compression as a Factor behind the Borrowing of English Medical Terminology
into Polish’, by Mariusz Górnicz) brings to light the concept of compression,
which, in terminology, “refers to the condensation of a term’s surface
structure relative to its conceptual content” (p. 161). The main thesis of the
chapter is that borrowing from English to Polish is favored if the English
structures present types of compression that are difficult to translate into
Polish.
Chapter Eight, the last one, is entitled ‘Compounding Properties and
Translation Methods of Terms in the Domain of Infectious Diseases’, by Szymon
Machowski. The author analyses English compound words in the studied domain
regarding the onomasiological dimension and the formal (morphological)
dimension; he then observes the translation equivalents in Polish and finds
some tendencies, like the fact that “a number of English neoclassical
compounds can be almost literally translated into Polish using highly cohesive
compounds” (p. 195).
The last pages of the book include a list of contributors (p. 201) and and
author index (p. 203-209).
EVALUATION
As is common in the case of edited books, each chapter may be evaluated by
itself, although some common features may be pointed out.
As for common, general features, it must be pointed out that the book is an
important contribution to the study of transparency. Linguists and
terminologists who need to deal with the concept of transparency and its
consequences in lexical/terminological semantics will find here many examples
and theoretical support.
Another important aspect of the book is that it contributes to making public,
in the English language, the works of many Eastern European linguists, like
Furdík (2008) and Horecký (1982), cited in Chapter Four, and others.
Although most chapters present a strong concern with morphological theory in
relation to semantics, Chapter Five, especially, presents a very thorough list
of semantic relations between the constituents of compounds, adapted from the
ideas of Jackendoff (2010), which can also serve as a methodology for further
research on other languages. Methodological rigor, by the way, is another
important trait of all the book’s contributions.
As is common in some approaches to terminology, some contributions, especially
the ones dealing with translation issues, have a prescriptive orientation.
This is particularly clear in Chapter Seven: “Science is supposed to describe
the world in an objective manner and so the vehicles of this description, i.e.
terms, ought to be precise, objective and impartial” (p. 166). The author
brings out these prescriptive ideas in the context of the discussion on
metaphorical terms. It should be pointed out, however, that Terminology
theory, especially after works like Temmerman (2000), acknowledges the
importance of metaphor in scientific discourse, although the subject is still
controversial.
Although the contributions are descriptively thorough in methodology and
results, it should be pointed that, on a more theoretical level, the
discussions on the concept of transparency would certainly benefit from
greater study of another related concept, that is, compositionality. Whether a
compound is more or less transparent is related to the ease of ‘computing’ the
meaning of the whole regarding the meaning of its parts. For instance, in
Chapter Four, Panocová presents a four-dimensional description of the
synonymous terms ‘otitis externa’ and ‘swimmer’s ear’, arguing that both terms
share the semantic features ‘Process of infection affecting the ear’, and that
the second term includes the semantic feature ‘typical for people who often
swim’. However, one could refute this argument by saying that nothing in the
expression ‘swimmer’s ear’ refers to an infection (it could be a cosmetic
condition, like ‘shoemaker’s chest’, synonym for ‘pectus excavatum’). The
interpretation of ‘swimmer’s ear’ is, therefore, not fully compositional;
could it also be considered nontransparent because of that? Would transparency
be an onomasiological reflex of (conceptual) compositionality? In what way are
both concepts related? In Chapter Seven, Górnicz cites an ISO Norm which
defines transparency as the situation when “the meaning of a term of
appellation can be deduced from its parts” (p. 161), a definition which is
remarkably similar to that of compositionality. Theoretical discussions like
these are unfortunately lacking in this book.
I would like also to point out two other specific issues in Chapter One, that
do not compromise the quality of the work: firstly, the author says that “[i]n
antiquity, medications were named after the gods, e.g. morphine after
Morpheus, the god of dreams and anandamide after Sanskrit Ananda, ‘bliss,
delight’ (OED)” (p. 13). However, the two substances mentioned were isolated
and received their names in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively.
Secondly, in the description of the elements of the INN nomenclature (p. 19),
the author mentions a “random, fantasy prefix” and then, some lines below,
refers to it as a “meaningless prefix”. It would be more properly referred to
as an unmotivated, arbitrary prefix, as it can be argued that it does bear
some kind of meaning.
“Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English” is, therefore, a valuable
work for those interested in lexical and terminological studies, especially
for the deep descriptive and methodological quality of its contributions.
REFERENCES
Furdík, Juraj. 2008. Teória lexikálnej motivácie v slovnej zásobe [Theory of
lexical motivation in the lexis]. Ološtiak, Martin (ed.). Košice:
vydavatel’stvo LG.
Horecký, Ján. 1982. Systémový prístup k terminológii [Systemic approach to
terminology]. Kultúra slova 16: 333-338.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1975. Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon.
Language 51: 639-671.
Jackendoff, Ray. 2010. Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture
1975-2010. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Temmerman, Rita. 2000. Towards New Ways of Terminology Description: The
Sociocognitive Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Bruno O. Maroneze completed his Ph.D. in the University of Sao Paulo in 2011.
His Ph.D. thesis focuses on Brazilian Portuguese neologisms formed by
suffixation. His main research interests are on Lexicology, specifically word
formation, neologisms and diachronic studies of the lexicon. He is currently
teaching in the Faculty of Communication, Arts and Letters of the Universidade
Federal da Grande Dourados, MS, Brazil.
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