Following on from my recent post on genomics and personalised medicine, here is my personal Spanish-English glossary. It started as a short Excel file a few years ago when I translated a website for a Spanish  company that offers genetic testing services. It has developed over time but enjoyed a growth spurt after the ITI Medical & Pharmaceutical Network workshop in November when we discussed challenging terminology in a Spanish text on pharmacogenomics.

I converted my Excel file to a Multiterm termbase for Studio 2014. If you find the glossary useful,  you’re welcome to copy the table format into Excel and use the SDL OpenExchange Glossary Converter to create a termbase yourself.

Here are the main sources I used for this glossary:

1. Talking Glossary of Genetic Terms, National Institutes of Health. National Human Genome Research Institute. This has audio snippets from field experts, which really brings the subject to life.
2. Glosario de términos de genética, Universidad de Navarra
3. Libro Rojo, Cosnautas
4. Glossary of the NHS National Genetics and Genomics Education Centre
5. Human Genome Project glossary. There is also a useful list of acronyms on the HGP website
6. Glossary of Genetic Terms, Genetics Education Center, University of Kansas Medical Center

The first three are bilingual resources. However, they all have English as the source language. The Talking Glossary makes heavy use of Anglicisms and, in general, that’s what you find in wide use in the Spanish literature. This is also reflected in my glossary, which is largely based on Spanish terms that come up in my source texts. In contrast, Cosnautas – a native Spanish resource – provides more insight into searching for semantically-logical Spanish translations of English terms, so it’s particularly useful for people who translate into Spanish.

To illustrate these differences in practice, here are four challenging English terms that I’ve picked from my glossary. This is how they’ve been translated into Spanish in the three bilingual resources:

And now, switching language direction back to Spanish-English, here is my glossary of genetic terms:

Image attribution: © Alila Medical Media – Fotolia.com