What’s the best way to get up to speed in a field outside your comfort zone? Learn from the experts, confer with colleagues and build a good corpus. Last month I had the chance to do all three, thanks to an ITI MedNet workshop on diabetes. This is an account of what I learnt that day and, more importantly, how I learnt it.

Expert input

First, Dr Shanti Vijayaraghavan, a consultant diabetologist at Barts Health, London, gave two talks on diabetes management and complications to a group of fifty medical translators. Sandra Young has written an excellent account of these two sessions in The Deep End.

Peer learning

Then, we then split up into language-specific groups to discuss a text we’d been sent a couple of weeks earlier. The Spanish-English squad was assigned an extremely challenging article entitled Complicaciones de la diabetes y su asociación con el estrés oxidativo: un viaje hacia el daño endothelial.*

It was fascinating to compare notes on how we’d tackled terminology problems, complex expressions and possible source errors. We also discussed how to parse never-ending Spanish sentences and translate them into shorter, snappier English. The mix of Spanish and English native translators from a range of medical, linguistic and editing backgrounds meant we were able to pool our knowledge and learn from each other.

Corpus queries

Actually, I’m telling this story in the wrong order. As soon as I received the complex Spanish text on oxidative stress by email, I realised I was out of my depth. So, before I went to the MedNet workshop – before I even started my translation – I built a monolingual English corpus. In this case, I simply created a quick-and-dirty corpus from the article references and a key word search to locate other resources that would help produce meaningful results to my queries. After converting the PDF files to .txt, I opened the corpus in AntConc to start solving my doubts.

How does corpus analysis help solve doubts? It shows word usage in terms of frequency and context (concordance and collocation). Thus, I learnt that flujo de las hexosaminas is not ‘hexosamine flow’, but ‘hexosamine flux’. I confirmed that abbreviations such as uNOS and RAGE are in current use in the literature. And I discovered that ‘degradation’ is more common than ‘breakdown’ as a collocate of ‘extracellular matrix’.

Learning strategies in general

I learnt a lot about diabetes and oxidative stress through the MedNet workshop day and corpus analysis. I recommend applying this strategy to extend your knowledge in the long term. Sign up for courses in a specialised field, ask questions and participate on terminology forums, and use corpora to make sure you’re on the right path.

Specific resources

Here’s a link to my rough and ready diabetes corpus. It’s a .zip file containing 35 .txt files and about 500,000 words.

Below is a glossary that I compiled from the sessions on diabetes management and complications and the text on oxidative stress. However, it is really a joint effort, because many terms were discussed and translated by the Spanish-English group. The glossary will be published shortly in the ITI MedNet newsletter.**

* Marcelo A. Storino, Miguel A. Contreras, Jairo Rojano, Richard Serrano, Ana Nouel Revista Colombiana de Cardiología, Volume 21, Issue 6, Pages 392-398

** Reproduced with kind permission of the editor