Translation of medical texts: Development of a language resource portal on rare diseases

Abstract

This paper presents the features and potential of use of the latest version of the portal of multilingual linguistic resources on rare diseases that we are developing: RERCOR (3.1.2). Rare diseases are a large group of diseases that affect about 30 million people in the EU and about 47 million in Latin America. They are currently seeking greater visibility and priority in public health policies. The portal aims to provide multilingual tools to better understand the linguistic uses of this medical subdomain, especially its terminology and collocations. The large number of rare diseases (more than 6000) and their diverse consequences mean that this field brings together numerous medical specialties and many other areas related to the field of health in its broadest sense. This multidisciplinary nature makes RERCOR useful for the translation, revision and editing of texts from the entire biomedical field, as well as for research and teaching purposes. RERCOR consists of three applications available through a freely accessible web interface: a corpus query application, a vocabularies query application and an assistant for writing texts. The first facilitates the search for concordances and morphosyntactic, collocational and contextual information in six corpora — three bilingual (French and Spanish) and two trilingual (English, French and Spanish) —, comparable and parallel, lemmatized and labeled. The second allows consultation of a trilingual glossary and three bilingual vocabularies that include equivalents in other languages and additional information such as definition, synonyms or other names. The third application consists of a prototype to facilitate the writing of texts on this medical subdomain. The design of the portal allows a complete, dynamic and intuitive consultation without requiring specific computer knowledge.

Keywords
medical terminology; medical translation; rare diseases; specialised corpora; multilingual resources