earticle

영어

A surgery consent form is a document that provides the patient with overall information on the surgical treatment involved and shows that he or she is giving an informed consent based on such information. This study analyzes the use of the medical terminology and the textual forms in Korean-into-English translation of surgery consent forms in the light of the genre conventions of the source and target cultures. This study chooses three sets of texts: Korean surgery consent forms (STa/STb), English translations of the Korean surgery consent forms (TTa/TTb), and surgery consent forms originally written in English (STe). This paper centers upon the level of difficulty of the medical terminology used in the texts and the variations in the formal aspect of the surgery consent forms. The findings of this study are as follows: First, there are variations between STa/STb and TTa/TTb, and between TTa/TTb and STe in the use of professional terminology, and the textual form. The level of difficulty of the terminology used in TTa/TTb has been found to be generally higher than that of the terminology in STe. Second, unlike the STa/STb and TTa/TTb that emphasize the expository aspect of the text by omitting the party who gives the surgical treatment involved and the party who receives it, STe frequently mentions the two parties explicitly as the sentential subject before asking for a consent. To target receivers who are used to both the target culture and the target language, and who have no knowledge of the professional terminology, the surgery consent forms may be difficult to understand. For this reason, when a text that belongs to a genre whose conventions are different in the two cultures involved, the target text needs to be produced in accordance with the textual conventions of the target culture, not the source culture.