TOWARDS A “GLOBALIZATION” OF TRANSLATION: THE OFFICIAL TRANSLATION OF MEDICALLEGAL DOCUMENTS (ENGLISH-SPANISH)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study and classify medical-legal documents to help the translator to deal with the translation of this type of texts. The selection of these texts has been undertaken in response to actual market demand. Medical-legal documents are hybrid texts that are in between scientific (medical) translation and legal and administrative translation. As far as content is concerned, they are more related to medical texts but according to form, structure of document, and recipient (usually Administration or authorities) they share more characteristics with legal or administrative texts. It is a descriptive and comparative study of five documents that are most representative of medical and legal texts: certificate of death, advance decision to refuse treatment (ADRT), notification of infectious disease or food poisoning, prescription, and medical record. This study includes definition of concepts, types of texts, general characteristics, regulation and legislation, document content, document structure, and so on.