The aim of this study is to show how laypersons interpret medical terms that are important for the achievement of certain communicative purposes in briefings for informed consent. The basic assumption is that doctors verbalize medical knowledge by using specific linguistic forms and that untrained interpreters will have difficulty in finding equivalent linguistic forms in the target language. The book is organized as follows: after an introduction (chapter 1) and a critical review of other discourse-analytical approaches to medical interpreting (chapter 2), the institutional setting is analyzed in order to show how the linguistic structure of briefings for informed consent is shaped by the institutional framework (chapters 3 and 4).