Where literal translation fails
Literal translation can preserve individual words while changing meaning, style or legal effect. Accurate translation reconstructs the message in the target language while retaining the scientific content and the register its readers expect.
Meaning and word choice
Grammatical correctness does not guarantee the intended scientific meaning. In one German-to-English translation, “not statistically significant” became “statistically insignificant”, although a result lacking statistical significance may still be important. Terms with several meanings require attention to their intended sense, and a word’s definition should be understood before a thesaurus is used to find alternatives.
English-to-Spanish examples
Repetition
English consent forms repeatedly qualify trial elements with “study”: doctor, personnel, drug, treatment, site and visits. English tolerates this better than Spanish, perhaps because its words are shorter and it uses fewer articles and prepositions: “study doctor” has four syllables against seven in médico del estudio, and “study drug” three against nine in medicamento del estudio.
Lexical repetition is considered poor style in Spanish. Alternatives include el investigador for “study doctor” and el hospital for “study site”; investigador is less imposing in Spanish than “investigator” in English. “Research study” is better rendered as ensayo clínico, as many Spanish ethics committees request, or investigación, which does not mean the same as English “investigation”. Elsewhere, estudio can be omitted when it adds no significant meaning in context.
One word and several equivalents
Literal translation can assume that one source word must always have one target equivalent. This consistency is desirable for scientific terms in highly technical contexts, but many words in participant information and consent forms are not technical, and variation can improve Spanish readability. For example, “visit” may be visita, cita or control.
“Procedure” can be procedimiento, actividad, prueba or estudio according to context, or sometimes omitted. “You will have the following procedures” can become le harán lo siguiente, with the verb hacer carrying the procedural meaning. Clients may nevertheless demand procedimiento at every source occurrence of “procedure”.
Discourse and length
Traditional Spanish discourse relies more on prior statements and the reader’s existing knowledge, allowing less repetition. A Spanish translator’s 2015 account estimated that literal English-to-Spanish translation tends to expand by 15–20%, whereas traditional Spanish rhetoric can limit expansion to about 5% or 10% at most, particularly in consent texts where repetition can be removed without losing meaning.
Abbreviations and acronyms
Spanish uses abbreviations and acronyms less frequently than English, often shortening a compound to its strongest word. Thus resonancia is the usual colloquial shortening of resonancia magnética nuclear, while RM and RMN belong more to technical jargon and writing, unlike the widely understood English MRI. Systemic lupus erythematosus can similarly become lupus rather than LES when the preceding text and patient’s knowledge identify the specific disease. A familiar patient term may therefore suit a consent form better than an acronym, although clients may expect an acronym wherever English uses one.
Grammar and syntax
English interference can introduce excessive Spanish possessives, including ungrammatical forms such as su médico del estudio for “your study doctor”. Demonstratives may need recasting: “This is a randomized study” can become este ensayo es de tipo aleatorizado or el ensayo es de tipo aleatorizado.
English -ly adverbs should not automatically become Spanish -mente forms, which are longer and less frequently used. “Daily” can be todos los días or una vez al día rather than diariamente, and “weekly” todas las semanas or una vez por semana rather than semanalmente. For administration routes, por vía intravenosa is preferred to intravenosamente.
Spanish’s freer word order allows a sentence to be reconstructed rather than follow English order. “A total of 100 patients will take part in this study” can become participarán en esta investigación 100 pacientes, putting the verb first and the subject last and allowing “a total of” to disappear because the figure no longer starts the sentence.
Legal and cultural adaptation
A 2015 discussion of Spanish consent translations identified disclosure rendered as divulgación as a recurring legal-cognate problem: divulgación implies public dissemination, exceeding the authorised exchange patients agree to. The Spanish data-protection act discussed there used comunicación and cesión, and ethics committees repeatedly objected to the literal rendering.
Healthcare-system content also needs adaptation: the same guidance recommended reworking US payment, copay, payer and medical-bill passages for Spain’s free-of-charge universal-access system. It recommended local trademarks and international nonproprietary names instead of US or British names, and millilitres rather than teaspoons for blood volumes.
Sentence recasting
A long list of nominal groups can need only a separating comma: adding one before “or prophylaxis” makes clear that prophylaxis is separate from “overdose of coumarin or coumarin derivatives”.
Literal syntax can need deletion or reconstruction. In a German vaccine summary, nicht später als vor Vollendung der 12. Lebenswoche obscured timing; deleting nicht später als left the direct instruction vor Vollendung der 12. Lebenswoche, improving readability and accuracy.
A more complex German vaccine sentence nested the population, efficacy endpoint, serotypes, timing and observation period. Surface editing was unlikely to suffice: the proposed recasting departed from the English syntax and used two sentences to separate the efficacy measurement from the observation period.
Genre and register
Clinical jargon and familiar professional phrases may sound unusual in everyday language, but replacing or omitting them can radically change register and make the text harder for medical readers to grasp. Biomedical genres have distinct styles that translations should reproduce, requiring familiarity with the discipline’s language rather than substitution of general language or another field’s terminology. The translator must analyse the source’s language and style, transfer its scientific content and adapt its expression to target-reader conventions.