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In:Exploring and Exploiting Parallel Corpora of Spanish: The PaCorES corpus collection in language and translation education and research
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 129] 2026
► pp. 203–224

Accessing MedCor through the English–Spanish parallel corpus PaEnS

Examples for contrastive and translational analysis

 | University of Valladolid
 | Autonomous University of Barcelona
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
MedCor is a manually aligned English-Spanish parallel corpus of medical fiction, recently integrated into PaEnS. This contribution explores its potential applications for translator training and contrastive linguistic analysis. Drawing on real examples from TV series, we illustrate how MedCor enables the observation of lexical, grammatical and pragmatic features typical of medical discourse and their translation. Particular attention is paid to emotionally charged language, idioms, and modal verbs. Overall, the findings show that MedCor constitutes a valuable resource for analyzing translational patterns and supporting research, teaching and professional practice in medical translation.
Article outline
  • 1.Corpus-based research on medical language
    • 1.1Previous applied studies using parallel corpora in the medical field
  • 2.MedCor: A manually aligned parallel corpus of medical fiction
    • 2.1Corpus features and creation process
    • 2.2The integration of MedCor into PaEnS
    • 2.3Potential applications of MedCor
  • 3.The use of MedCor in contrastive analysis and translation research and training
    • 3.1Examples of translational, pragmatic, and stylistic phenomena in MedCor
      • 3.1.1Specialized terminology
      • 3.1.2Language naturalness and taboo expressions
      • 3.1.3Imperatives and directive acts
      • 3.1.4Modal verbs and their pragmatic modulation
      • 3.1.5Empathy, mitigation, and emotional modulation
      • 3.1.6Idioms and phraseological expressions
      • 3.1.7Figurative meaning: Comparisons and metaphors
    • 3.2Discussion of results
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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