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Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 297–316

Chapter 13
The popularization of learned medicine in late seventeenth-century England

Accommodating translation strategies and textual aspects

| University of Insubria

Following from the popularizing work of Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654), who published an unauthorized translation of the Royal College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia in 1649, the late seventeenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of vernacular medical texts, many of which were translations. As the sources of most of these texts had been published in Latin by some of the most important medical authors of the time with the intent of circulating them only among the European medical elite, their translation into English had a profound ideological significance, because it rendered them virtually accessible to all who could read. This chapter analyzes five such vernacularizations in order to gain an insight into the specific translation methods and procedures that were adopted by translators to accommodate the specialized subject and language of medicine to an audience of non-specialists.

Keywords: medical vernacularization, medical popularization, translation studies, historical discourse analysis, historical pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Aims, corpus and methods
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Macro-textual and discursive elements
    • 3.2Translation procedures and popularization
    • 3.3Diatypic variation and translator attitude
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.13rov
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