Pour une simplification de la terminologie médicale multilingue : le cas du projet ExaMode

Abstract

Several studies have highlighted the complexity of medical language, which can prevent non-experts from understanding it, and the need to overcome this problem by developing a simplified variety of this language. This contribution aims to describe the simplification attempt that we carried out within the framework of the European research project ExaMode. In this article we analyze the terminological work that we conducted based on the study of authentic medical reports in Italian on four pathologies. The first step was to extract the terminology contained in these reports, followed by the collection of terminological data and the identification of the simplified variants of the different terms. We then describe the three simplification methods that we applied to the terms extracted from our corpus, namely substitution with a popular equivalent, decomposition by definition and hyperonym juxtaposition. Since the simplification of medical language can also be of interest for specialised translation, when the information is transmitted in a multilingual context, we applied the three simplification methods not only to Italian terms, but also to their French equivalents. Moreover, we collected all these data in bilingual terminology records organised according to the model of the multilingual and multifunctional resource TriMED. We then show the results of our whole study through a series of examples and emphasise the need to maintain coherence in the simplification choices of semantically related terms, so as to enhance comprehension even more. Finally, we emphasize the need to continue to enrich our data collection and to test our simplification suggestions to evaluate their effectiveness and make possible improvements.