This article focuses on the approach followed for teaching abstracts in a medical journal. The approach involves (1) defining medical discourse and outlining its main features, particularly at the lexical level; (II) cognate recognition exercises; (III) training students to identify salient features of the source text such as genre, purpose, syntactic complexity and lexical difficulties the translator should be aware of (IV) discussion of strategies to overcome these problems, and finally, (VI) comparing students' translations with a published translation of the abstract.