SOME ISSUES OF ENGLISH MEDICAL TERMINOGRAPHY IN THE CONTEXT OF ENGLISH GLOBALIZATION

Abstract

The research suggests the list of the most critical problems in medical terminography, such as, difficulties in the identification of terms, polysemy and synonymy, a great quantity of abbreviations, rapid expansion of the terminological field of medicine. The approach used consists in the analysis of the definitions of English medical terms in medical dictionaries widely used in Ukraine. The study of the theoretical literature and the results of the empirical research show, that the following aspects as adequacy (compliance of the meaning of the term with the modern scientific knowledge); accuracy (sound and semantic accuracy without doublets in microterminosystem); unambiguity (unified structural and semantic model); unification of terms representation should be central in improving lexicographical practice in the field of medical terminography. The identification of medical terms needs the specification of theoretical and clinical medicine at macro-, micro- and sub-microsystems levels. The work makes the attempt to identify these critical issues with focus on the problem of synonymy. To evince the state of the art in this area, we studied dictionary articles in which terms comprising the synonymic set “damage”: disorder, disturbance, hurt, impairment, injury, are defined. These and other issues are evident to the dictionary compilers. In different attempt to solve them, lexicographers resort to the incorporation of collocations with the key terms. New strategies of dictionaries compilation should be developed for medical terminography to serve the tasks of promoting effective multinational communication in English. Some of the strategies can be based on the complex dynamical systems theory. Medical terminography in the aggregate should be a complex dynamical system developing in context with the global processes in the field of medicine and in compliance with linguistic theory.