Characteristics such as interdisciplinarity and dynamism make both written medical communication and medical translation particularly complex. In order to address this complexity, researchers need to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective (involving discourse analysis, sociology of professions, knowledge communication, etc.) and to approach the communicative process as a complex and comprehensive chain of cause and effect interactions at three levels: cognitive (the translation act), situational (the translation event) and socio-cultural (norms, initiator, etc.). The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a research project concerned with communication in the highly sensitive area of cancer patients in two Spanish hospitals, to outline the methodological proposal of the Gentt Group, which advocates for flexibility in the approach (quantitative and qualitative methods) and for the use of the notion of genre as a conceptual tool for research purposes. The concept of genre combines linguistic, cognitive and contextual aspects, and it allows for links with translation studies theory.