Translingual alteration of conceptual information in medical translation

This research investigated conceptual alteration in medical article titles translation between English and Chinese with a twofold purpose: one was to further justify the findings from a pilot study, and the other was to further investigate how the concepts were altered in translation. The research corpus of 800 medical article titles in English and Chinese was selected from two English medical journals and two Chinese medical journals. The analysis was based on the pairing of concepts in English and Chinese and their conceptual similarity/dissimilarity via translation between English and Chinese. Two kinds of conceptual alteration were discussed: one was apparent conceptual alteration that was obvious with addition or omission of concepts in translation. The other was latent conceptual alteration that was not obvious, and can only be recognized by the differences between the original and translated concepts. The findings from the pilot study were verified with the findings from this research. Additional findings, for example, the addition/omission of single‐word and multiword concepts in the general and medical domain and, implicit information vs. explicit information, were also discussed. The findings provided useful insights into future studies on crosslanguage information retrieval via medical translation between English and Chinese, and other languages as well.