Translating Medical Discourse into Arabic

Medical Discourse (English for Medical Purposes) is so called by Ferguson (2013, p. 243), widening its scope to embrace professionals’ communication as well as others’ accesses to it. It now includes practitioners, professors, researchers, patients, nurses, among others. This is due to the widespread of interaction between practitioners of medicine on the one hand and almost all society members on the other. Swales (1990) has asserted that people come across medicine in the form of an “open-genre network” through a variety of tools such as posters, blogs, authentic medical websites, etc. along with the conventional means of academic communication, e.g. research articles, conference proposals.
Gotti, Maci & Sali stated that the complexity of medical discourse is basically due to the needs of different methods of interactions which deploy various registers between practitioners and researchers (2015). The concept of re-contextualizing the discursive modes in the medical field was discussed in detail. They gave examples of transforming domain-specific terms and phrases - e.g. stilbenoids was transformed into red wine and blueberries - to communicate better with the public. Gotti, Maci & Sali (2015) have further explained the “rhetorical phenomenon of re-contextualization of specialized discourse in medical weblogs” through which exchange occurs between medical experts’ (in informative comments) and interested public (in requests). Thus, the medical discourse features exclusively reformulation procedures in both language and content.