Abstract
This article aims to analyze the sociolinguistic variation of specialized meaning units (SMU) from a corpus referring to the detection phase of skin cancer. It is part of a broader contrastive investigation that is being carried out on the situational context of linguistic variation in relation to the phases of prevention, detection and treatment of this type of cancer. Concerning the methodology, the corpus is made up of texts from the National Cancer Institute's website in Spanish intended for health professionals that are developed in a situational context in which the sender and receiver are specialists, on the one hand, and by texts addressed to patients in a situational context characterized by a specialist sender and a lay public receiver, on the other. The results show strategic communication guidelines used by the specialist sender to provide the lay public with specialized knowledge, thus being able to contrast with the strategies used when addressing another specialist. Moreover, these results suggest that the linguistic variation constitutes a tool that allows to solve communication in both scenarios. And when these scenarios are transferred to a translational context, the translator, as an interlinguistic and intercultural mediator, resorts to similar communication strategies to adapt the source text to the different receiver profiles.
Keywords
monolingual situational context; bilingual situational context; specialized meaning units; sociolinguistic variation