This volume investigates the features and challenges of medical discourse between medical professionals as well as with patients and in the media. Based on corpus-driven studies, it includes a wide variety of approaches including cognitive, corpus and diachronic linguistics. Each chapter examines a different aspect of medical communication, including the use of metaphor referring to cancer, the importance of ethics in medical documents addressed to patients and the suitability of popular science articles for medical students. The book also features linguistic, textual and discourse-focused analysis of some fundamental medical genres. By combining sociological and linguistic research applied to the medical context, it illustrates how linguists and translation specialists can build bridges between health professionals and their patients.

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies.

This edited book presents a selection of new empirical studies in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), showcasing the best practices of educators in their particular contexts. The chapters cover settings grouped into three main categories: L2 abilities and English as a medium of instruction in English/Spanish bilingual contexts; ESP in international contexts; and EAP and academic writing. The authors examine topics and contexts that have been under-explored in the literature to date, contributing to wider discussions of English-language mediation in educational settings and also touching on areas such as international mobility, migration, and social integration in multicultural environments. This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners in an interdisciplinary range of fields, including applied linguistics, language education policy, multilingualism, migration policy, and positive psychology and motivation.

In this first book-length treatment of MELF, the authors assert that MELF represents an important contribution to our understanding of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), in that existing ELF research has been limited to relatively low stakes communicative situations, such as interactions in business, academia, internet blogging or casual conversations. Medical contexts, in contrast, often represent situations calling for exceptional communicative precision and urgency. Providing both evidence from their own research and analysis from (the limited number of) existing studies, the authors offer a counterpoint to the optimism regarding communicative success prevalent in ELF. The book proposes a theoretical perspective on how the various features of healthcare communication serve as important variables in shaping interaction among speakers of ELF, further enlarging our understanding of this emerging sub-field.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the use of patient-/person-centred communication in providing healthcare for ageing populations through an ethnographic approach to physician in-home medical consultations in Tokyo, Japan, alongside interviews with physicians. It focuses on illustrating how linguistic dimensions of person-centred communication work by citing examples of case studies, as well as the sociocultural differences between the US, the UK, Japan and other societies in which person-centred communication models are employed. The author uses her own framework, which takes into account face and politeness theory, and makes recommendations for future training.

Language, Literacy, and Health: Discourse in Brazil’s National Health System analyzes language, literacy, and health as social practices in Brazil’s national health system, the Unified Health System (SUS), with a particular focus on the Family Health Strategy program. The SUS was established in the 1990s, offering free consultations, health promotion activities, and home visits by a professional team to the Brazilian population. Using research conducted in two different Brazilian regions, the Northeast and the Southeast, Izabel Magalhães and Kênia Lara da Silva discuss language and literacy as discourse—a very important dimension of health practice—and different uses of texts, including multimodal texts. The research, analysis, and the authors’ ethnographic approach bring to light some issues with SUS practices, and the authors suggest improvements. This book contributes to the debate about language and literacy in health practices, in which patients are partly responsible for keeping well.

The contributions of this volume explore the dynamics of the interface between the cognitive and situational levels in translation and interpreting. Until relatively recently, there has been an invisible line in translation and interpreting studies between cognitive research (e.g., into mental processes or attitudes) and sociological research (e.g., concerning organization, status, or institutions). However, rapid developments in translation and interpreting practices (professional, non-professional) have brought to the fore the need to rethink theoretical perspectives and to apply new research methods. The chapters in this volume aim to contribute to this discussion through conceptual and/or empirical research. Drawing on different theoretical and methodological frameworks, they offer insights into diverse translation and interpreting situations, in a number of different countries and cultures, and their consequences for individual and collective cognition. Originally published as special issue of Translation Spaces 5:1 (2016).