| Abstract: |
I will discuss a medical dictionary based on the Keyword in context (KWiC) concept and speech recognition as a valuable tool. My daily work consists of compiling medical dictionaries for students and professionals (creating and updating complex and dynamic data) and creating medical spellcheckers. Non-Anglophone medical students and health care professionals around the globe need an active command of professional English for their career. Yet the lexical tools available for acquiring these skills are few and insuficient: American and British explanatory dictionaries expect readers to be native speakers, while bilingual medical dictionaries are basically glossaries and provide unlabelled translations. The only medical learner's dictionary in the world to date is the excellent Fachwortschatz Medizin by Michael and Ingrid Friedbichler, teaching English for medical purposes (EMP) in Austria. Their opus magnum, which helps non-native speakers to acquire language skills step by step, is structured using modular medical concepts and combines various lexical features:
- a monolingual dictionary: 100,000 medical terms grouped into 1400 sections with key headwords defined in simple English; contextualized with collocations and sample sentences demonstrating correct use, extracted from a 20-million-word corpus of medically authoritative texts;
- a semi-bilingual dictionary: support in the user's native language (German, Dutch) in the form of 42,000 translated keywords;
- a thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms and related terms;
- a domain-specific glossary: readers from all medical felds can focus on content relevant to their specialization;
- Windows edition: full-context search, customizable display (pronunciation, definition, translations, collocations), cross-references etc.
After acquiring the Dutch rights I realised that farming out the translation work would require me to extensively monitor the translators, who were discouraged by the highly condensed lexical content. I decided to translate the 42,000 indexed medical terms myself instead, using speech recognition and a 24" HD monitor to display my database content, a web browser, a word processor and two medical dictionaries. I developed voice-driven macros for automating 600,000 Google searches, creating 2000 records, searching dictionaries and my 52,000-record medical database etc. This allowed me to translate up to 400 terms per day. www.pinkhof.nl/medisch-engels: full Windows edition 10-day trial period, free download of 60-page sample PDF. |