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Article published In:
Specialised Translation in Spain: Institutional dimensions
Edited by José Santaemilia-Ruiz and Sergio Maruenda-Bataller
[Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 30:2] 2017
► pp. 592–610

Understanding and enhancing comprehensibility in texts for patients in an institutional health care context in Spain

A mixed methods analysis

| Universitat Jaume I
| Gentt group
This paper aims to analyse text comprehensibility in a corpus of Fact Sheets for Patients (FSPs) in Spanish as used in a real clinical and institutional setting in Spain; and to provide data and criteria that can help writers and translators to enhance text comprehensibility when dealing with FSPs. Regarding the methodology, we analysed a corpus of FSPs in Spanish in three subsequent stages: (1) readability formulae, (2) expert analysis, and (3) questionnaires and focus-groups addressing the real target readership of patients. Experts produced improved versions of two of the texts that were then compared and judged by the patients. According to the Inflesz/Word correlation we used in our analysis most texts of the corpus fall within normal difficulty values. However, the communication experts made critical comments about some of them regarding both readability and legibility and patients expressed the need for improvement of some aspects of the texts. This fact leads us to conclude that there is considerable room for improvement in FSPs in Spanish. Highly-sensitive patients and situations require the participation of real patients as readers in order to achieve the optimum degree of quality of originals and translations. Therefore, patients’ perceptions can be crucial to medical writers and translators when writing FSPs in a more comprehensible and empathetic way.
Keywords: medical translation, institutional contexts, doctor-patient communication, patient-centred care, fact sheets for patients (FSP), comprehensibility
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • Stage I.Analysing comprehensibility through readability formulae
    • Stage II.Analysing comprehensibility through questionnaires to language and communication specialists
    • Stage III.Analysing comprehensibility through focus-groups and questionnaires answered by patients
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion, conclusion and practical implications
    • 4.1Discussion and conclusion
    • 4.2Limitations and practical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.00008.gar
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