Morten Pilegaard starts his article by defining the approach normally adopted for medical discourse, i.e. a sociolinguistic rather than a functional approach. This approach describes and analyses medical discourse in terms of speakers and communicative situations. He continues by discussing the history of medical translation and the relevance of the study of medical translation. Next he focuses on the contrastive character of the latter discipline. In the second part he focuses on the genre of the medical research paper. His conclusions are that in medical translation equivalence must be sought at both the lexico-syntactic and textual levels. Secondly, modifications must be guided by genre and culture-specific conventions at different language levels. Thirdly, close collaboration between author and translator should maintain the balance between the conventions of the international research paper and the idiosyncracies of the ST. In a final instance, he stresses the need for specialised translation tools and for further studies of translation of medical texts.