Chapter published in:
Handbook of Terminology: Volume 2. Terminology in the Arab world
Edited by Abied Alsulaiman and Ahmed Allaithy
[Handbook of Terminology 2] 2019
► pp. 83–108

Chapter 4
Medical terminology in the Western world

Current situation

This chapter first describes the fundamentals of medical concept formation, the different types of medical concepts and the specific properties of medical terms. We provide an overview of the most important types of terminologies (controlled vocabularies) and databases and recent medical terminology standardization activities at the national and international levels (CEN/TC 251). We introduce the domain of medical linguistics as a field of study that is concerned with specific aspects of medical language to enable the computer-aided recording, storage, and retrieval of medical data. The following types of terminologies and databases will be described in greater detail: anatomical and nosological nomenclatures, coding systems (International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), indexing systems (Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)), thesauri and metathesauri (Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and the bibliographic database Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online). We conclude with a discussion of science popularization strategies for general health texts in terms of intralingual translation between Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Language for General Purposes (LGP), as well as implications for interlingual translation of medical terminology for lay readers.

Keywords: medical terminology, medical databases, controlled vocabularies, medical terminology standardization, medical linguistics, science popularization, lay-friendliness, health information texts, Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), Language for General Purposes (LGP), intralingual translation, explicitation
Article outline
  • 1.Historical background of medical terminology
  • 2.Medical language
  • 3.Challenges related to medical language
  • 4.Medical nomenclatures, clinical terminologies and coding systems
    • 4.1Medical nomenclatures
      • 4.1.1The anatomical nomenclature
      • 4.1.2Nosological nomenclature and clinical terminologies
    • 4.2Coding and classification systems
    • 4.3Combined system: Medical terminology and coding system
    • 4.4Metathesaurus
    • 4.5Indexing system
    • 4.6MEDLINE
  • 5.Recent national and international medical terminology standardization activities
  • 6.Science popularization and lay-friendliness in health information texts
  • 7.Summary
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.2.05wer
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