Medical abbreviations are essential to a translator’s life
Medical abbreviations are extremely common in healthcare documents. Some, such as DNA, are universally recognised and even more widely used than their full forms. Others, such as CI (“confidence interval”), are less familiar outside specialist environments.
Because English dominates scientific communication, many medical abbreviations are now used internationally. This creates an important challenge for translators. Should they translate the abbreviation into the target language, or should they keep the English version commonly used by medical professionals?
