A TRADUÇÃO DE SIGLAS E ACRÔNIMOS EM TEXTOS ACADÊMICOS DE CIÊNCIAS DA SAÚDE

Abstract

Specialized texts are means of communication that spread knowledge, science and technology, and contain characteristic special terminology. Technical translation, having Health Sciences as a notable field, is the activity that spreads this knowledge throughout different languages and registers acronyms and initialisms as a bottleneck for translation. These forms of shortening words are cultural referents that are used for several types of concepts and phenomena and can often be found easing reading, writing and memorization. Albeit most of the workload of professional translators consists of specialized texts, scientific research assessing this area in Translation Studies is considered scarce. This research examines cases of acronyms and initialisms in Health Sciences papers published in Portuguese and in English and aims to i) verify if these forms are presented accordingly to ABNT standards 14724:2011 and 6022:2018; ii) track decisions made for translations into English, and iii) create classification categories, that will be associate to the ones developed by Giraldo (2012-2013). The assessed parallel and bilingual corpus is made of five papers form Health Sciences journals that are simultaneously published in Portuguese and in English. The acronyms and initialisms were extracted from these papers and the text segment that contains its first appearance in the text body. These elements were examined and categorized by type, origin, relative position to the full name, typing marking, translation decision, and accordance with ABNT standards. Next, the acronyms and initialisms were sorted quantitatively in every category individually and in intersections between origin and type, and position and type to detect linkages. Results show that a) the corpus contains more initialisms than acronyms; b) acronyms and initialisms are mostly from proper origin; c) in most cases they occur after the full name; d) initialisms tend to be from proper origin; e) elements of mixed origin tend to be acronyms; f) in general, acronyms and initialisms are in parenthesis; g) they are, in general, adequate to a consolidated translation into the target language; h) are generally presented accordingly to ABNT standards, even considering that several non-compliant cases were found in the assessed sample; and, finally i) some acronyms tend to become initialisms in the translation from Portuguese into English.