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More Common Errors in Medical English Writing Word Usage

In Some Common Errors in Medical English Writing Word Usage, we’ve already presented numerous examples. As we have explained, when writing in technical or specialized fields, writers need to be aware of certain rules and standards. In the field of medical writing, editing, and proofreading, the American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style (9th edition) is the most widely used style manual. Again, we would like to recommend that you use the AMA Manual of Style to make your medical English writing as good as it possibly can be.

In this essay, we will look at several additional examples of both correct and incorrect medical English writing usage.

Disc versus Disk
In casual writing, these two words are often used interchangeably. Some writers might simply prefer one spelling to the other.

However, the AMA Manual of Style recommends using disc and disk in different, specific ways. Use disc when writing about the eye, or ophthalmology. Use disk when referring to other parts of the anatomy. Two examples of correct medical usage are optic disc and lumbar disk.

There are two exceptions to this rule: (1) disk should also be used when writing about computers. For example, disk drive and hard disk are both correct usage; and (2) disc is the term to be used for entertainment media, as in compact disc and videodisc.

Doctor versus Physician
Doctor is a more general term than physician. It includes, for example, such medical professionals as dentists, veterinarians, pediatricians, and surgeons. It even refers to anyone with a PhD degree in a discipline other than medicine. Someone can, for example, be a doctor of history or politics!

Physician is a more specific term and refers only to doctors who have an MD or a DO degree. (MD is the acronym for Doctor of Medicine and DO is the one for Doctor of Osteopathy.) In medical writing, and even in casual language, you should not use physician to refer to a doctor who does not have an MD or DO degree.

Dose versus Dosage
These words can be confusing for medical writers and editors as well as those in other fields. Dose is a single or total amount of medication. Dosage is the rate at which the patient receives the medication.

If you are taking a medication and each pill is 25 mg, then each of your pills is a dose of 25 mg. Your doctor might instruct you to take one 25 mg pill every 12 hours. This is the dosage because it specifies both the amount and the rate of administration. If your doctor instructs you to take this dosage for 10 days, your total dose will be 500 mg. Remember, a dose is an amount, only, whereas a dosage is an amount plus an indication of frequency.

Health Care versus Healthcare
Most medical English writers use this term correctly. However, it is common for writers to write it as one word. In formal or scholarly writing, it should always be written as two words. According to Webster’s health care, healthcare, and even health-care are all synonymous and interchangeable. Remember that Webster’s is for general use while the AMA is for professionals.

You might see "healthcare" in the names of companies and in some advertising and marketing literature. This is usually intentional and is done for creative, brand or stylistic reasons. If you are writing for or about a company that uses "healthcare" as one word, you should follow that company's style. However, when writing a research article or any scholarly text, you should always write health care as two words.

Keeping Track of Tracts
It is often colloquial usage to leave out the term, tract, when discussing certain infections. Two examples of this are respiratory infection and urinary infection. However, for the medical writer, the correct forms, including the word tract, must be written as respiratory tract infection and urinary tract infection.

There are so many rules and standards to be aware of when writing in a specialized field such as medicine. Usage is just one of them, and it can be a tricky area for native and non-native English writers alike. That is why there are style manuals, editors, and proofreaders. They are all tools to help avoid and correct errors in medical English writing. We hope this brief discussion of usage can help you to avoid some common errors in your own medical English writing.

If you are interested in writing, Wikileaks may have just the leaked topic that you have been looking for in your search for a writing topic.

Wikipedia defines Wikilinks as follows:

Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive religious, corporate and government documents, while taking measures to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. Running on modified MediaWiki software, Wikileaks is hosted by PRQ, an Internet service provider in Sweden.

Please take a look at Wikileaks to see what is being kept hidden from us.

This quote is from George Bernard Shaw:

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

We would like to quote Wikipedia:

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright. Born in Dublin, he moved to London at the age of twenty and lived in England for the remainder of his life.

Although Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for drama, and during his career he authored more than sixty plays. Nearly all of his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but are leavened by a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege and found them all defective, but his ire was most aroused by the exploitation of the working class; his writings seldom fail to censure that abuse. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthful lifestyles.

Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They made their home in Ayot St. Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling.

He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw would have refused his Nobel Prize outright, because he had no desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.

Please click the link above if you would like to read more about Shaw.

Today we would like to quote part of a Wikinews article on Arecibo, the world's largest telescope:

For nearly half a century the world's largest telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has been observing our solar system and the universe around it. Completed by Cornell University along with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1963, Arecibo's enormous size gives it the ability to collect more light than any other telescope, allowing it to observe objects that are too faint for other radio telescopes to see. Its main purposes are radio astronomy, aeronomy and radar astronomy, but is probably most famous for its continuing use to search for and attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life outside our solar system and beyond.

Now Arecibo is facing severe budget cuts which could ultimately close the facility. In an in depth exclusive report, Wikinews examined how much of the observatory's budget was at risk, and what the possible outcomes could be for the programs currently relying on Arecibo as their main research tool. Wikinews spoke to several individuals closely affiliated with projects and facilities who use significant time at the observatory.

Currently, the NSF funds the operations of Arecibo with just over US$10 million every year. By 2011 they plan to drastically cut that funding to only $4 million a year, nearly 65% less than the current budget. To counter that loss, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would authorize NASA to spend at least 2 million dollars of their nearly $21 billion budget to fund portions of Arecibo until 2009. But that still leaves more than half of the loss to be recovered, and if something isn't done soon the facility will be closed by 2011 - or sooner if additional cuts are made.

Arecibo is 305 meters in diameter and 300 meters tall at its highest point. It also has an on-site remote sensing LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system to detect light and range of a given object in space. Construction began in 1960 and the observatory officially opened on November 1, 1963. Since then, several projects, programs and discoveries were made possible because of the telescope. Its platform also received a fresh coat of paint in late 2007, the first since it was built.

In 1989, the first images of an asteroid named 4769 Castalia were captured using Arecibo. In 1992 Aleksander Wolszczan, an astronomer from Poland used Arecibo to discover pulsar PSR B1257+12 which then led him to discover the first three extrasolar planets in history, and possibly a comet. Scientists with the Near Earth Object Program also use the observatory to track possible meteors and asteroids that have the potential to strike the Earth. Arecibo is also part of the Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service (EXPReS) project which is aimed at connecting telescopes from Africa, Europe and North and South America to create a 6,000 mile wide telescope. This allows all connected telescopes to observe the exact same spot in the sky giving scientists images 100 times better than any single telescope on Earth. A successful test of this system was completed on May 22. The observatory was also featured in the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster and several James Bond films.

Click the link above if you would like to read the rest of this article or see other news at Wikinews.

『 活きた翻訳を目指して ( 日英翻訳 ) 』

一概に医療翻訳といっても、その内容は多岐に渡る。学術研究論文はもちろんのこと、治験レポート、医療機器解説書、ひいては個人の健康診断書や保険契約書まで、幅広く細分化された各分野における専門家たちの成果と熱意を伝える―それが医療翻訳家の仕事であり愉しみであり、いわゆる特権であるとも言えるだろう。

翻訳の質をより高めるために。
極めて基本的なのだが、これを自らの課題としながら何年か経つ。
『 語彙力を増やす 』--もちろんである。医学は解剖学用語だけでも一言語の辞書一冊分に相当するくらいということだから、ボキャブラリーが十分でなければあわや最初からつまずいてしまうということにもなりかねない。
『 知識量を増やす 』--これもまたしかりだ。言うまでもなく医学の躍進は著しい。最新医療に久しくして、最先端を綴る原稿の何たるかを理解し訳すというのはきわめて至難の業だ。
『 納期を守る 』--当たり前だが、原則だ。納得のいくものを定められた期間内にきちんと収めること。これはクライアントや同僚に対するプロとしての礼儀である。（ 少なくともそう心がけているつもりである ）。
『 原文には忠実に 』--翻訳が翻訳でありうる必要最低十分条件といえば、この一言に尽きるだろう。翻訳者たるもの、あくまで正確に内容を伝えることこそが本分でありそこに例外はない。

以上を大前提とした上で、あえてここでは翻訳の『 質 』そのものに焦点をおきたい。

『 センテンス、パラグラフの構成、文章のバランスやメリハリはどうか 』
言葉を一語一句置き換えるだけでいいというのであれば、翻訳ソフトと分厚い医療辞典を駆使して難なく事が済んでしまう話である。しかし、いかに科学的 / 医学的なテーマを扱っているとはいえ文章は文章なのだ。原文をきちんと抑えつつ、かつリズム感とワードチョイスに配慮しながら、分かりやすく読み心地のよい文章を作り出していきたい。そのためには何度も繰り返し読み返し、時には声にも出してみて全体の流れを確認するという地道な作業が必要になる。

また、それぞれの言語において「 好ましい文章の構成 」は違う場合があるということを常に念頭に置いておかなくてはならない。例えば、日本語医療原稿の概要で前置きから結論に至るまでの過程を英訳する場合、そのまま句読点ごとに訳してしまえば要点の極めて見えにくい、どこか間延びした印象の英文になってしまうことがしばしばある。そのような時には、文章の意図するところをきちんと把握した上で、記述の前後を入れ替えてみたり、重要点が明らかな場合はあえてそこを強調するような語彙( 動詞や形容詞や接続詞 )を選んだり、時には読み手の混乱を招きそうな長い一文を二文に分けてみるなどの機転がスマートな解決策に繋がることもある。

『 原文の意図するところをきちんと見極める 』
その分野の知識が豊富であるないにかかわらず、内容自体が捉えにくい記述に出合うこともある。主語が明白でない場合や、形容詞がどこにかかってくるのかが曖昧な場合。また、時制がいまひとつはっきりしない場合などがそうだ。つまり、日本語ではあえて曖昧でも構わない、しかし英語ではそうはいかないという状況である。もちろん、前後の文章やパラグラフからおおまかな推測をすることは可能だ。だがそれに甘んじてしまうというのは、思いのほか危険なことでもある。
いかなる疑問点もチームに報告し、校閲時には一つ残さずクライアントに確認すること、そういった細やかさと誠意をもって仕事ができたら仕上がりは自ずと気持ちのよい出来になる。翻訳者もコーディネーターもクライアントも。コミュニケーションを惜しまずに尽力し、互いに満足のいくものが生まれたら、それは純粋にかけがえのない喜びであることは確かだろう。

『 幾つもの目を通す （ 新鮮な目 ） 』
いかに数多く翻訳をこなそうとも、ミスというものはありうる。スペルのミス、文法のミス、ひょんな勘違い…。きちんと気をつけているつもりでも知らぬ間に落とし穴に嵌まり込み、そこで運よく気がつけば良いのだが、単純で小さいからこそ見落としてしまう、そういったミスがどんなベテランにもある時はあるのだ。
訳が仕上がったからといって速納品してしまうのではなく、最低数回の読み返し、例えば仕上がり後一息ついてから一度、食事の後リラックスしてからもう一度、更には半日後あるいは一日経ってからダメ押しでもう一度、気分をまっさらな白紙に戻した状態で読んでみると、先ほどは見逃した誤りや意外な改善点に気が付いたりするものだ。（ もちろん、締切日ギリギリに仕上げを設定しまうとそれは難しいのだが ）そうやって納品までこぎつけたのち、さらに第二の翻訳者（ あるいは複数の ）、別の人間の目を通すことの重要性についてはいうまでもない。
視点を変えてみながら何度もチェックすること。ある意味それは、全工程を通して最も気の抜けない作業なのかもしれない。たとえそれがネイティブ自身による翻訳だったとしても、丁寧なプルーフ ・ リーディング ( 校正 )あるいは経験豊富な専門家による校閲なしでは完全とはいえない、そう常日頃感じ入るところである。

活きた翻訳をしたい。
そう思うようになったのは、これまで数多くの優秀で魅力的な原稿に出会ったからだ。そのほとんどは長年の研究の集大成であり、（ 医療の場合は特に ）どれも命を扱う崇高な内容だった。それらの尊さを、翻訳によって色褪せさせてはならない。むしろ、原稿を生き生きとしたまま届けたい。その価値を多くの人に伝えたい。そう心から望んでやまない。
国がより開け、多国間にまたがるあらゆる情報が行き交うようになり、日本でも複数の言語を自由に操れる人材が簡単に見つかるような時代になった。
だからこそ、あえて今『 質 』を追求する努力をしたい。
言語の壁が透明になる時代。そんな未来はきっともうすぐそこまで来ているに違いない。