Lexical Notes

A blog about translation, editing, and writing in the sciences.

Illustration of a bird flying.

  • De novo

    Igor Dmitruk

    Time and time again I will stumble upon an expression that means exactly the opposite of again: “de novo.” To the letter, these two Latin words simply mean “of new.” In the biomedical sciences, “de novo” describes the first manifestation of a mutation, disease or biological process: de novo deletion, de novo acute lymphoblastic leukemia, de novo-induced T cells.

    Translators often will treat “de novo” like any other Latin expression, such as “in vivo” or “post mortem.” In Romance languages, this usually involves shifting the expression to the canonical adjective position, after the main noun, and voilà: microdélétion de novo, malattia metastatica de novo.

    But in Portuguese we have a problem, because “de novo” is a vernacular idiom that happens to mean “once again,” exactly the opposite of the medical meaning intended in English. So I argue that we need to treat this term differently in Portuguese.

    I imagine that many colleagues would disagree, saying that “de novo” is established jargon among scientists who often read their sources in English anyway, and that we can use italics to bring forward the Latin meaning, much like we do with “in vivo.”

    My counter argument would be threefold:

    • There’s a broad spectrum of biomedical literacy among readers of clinical trial documentation, from specialists to patients. An Ethics Committee will have representatives from fields such as philosophy and social service, as well as patients’ rights advocates. Although we should modulate the register for the audience, we also need some level of consistency in the documentation, and “de novo” will often appear in study titles or advertising materials.
    • Computer systems used for regulatory submissions often struggle with even basic text processing tasks such as character encoding. Formatting is simply absent from text fields such as study title, description, endpoints etc. There’s a consensus in this industry that all important communication happens through PDFs. So when we use italics to compose meaning, we are giving up on that semantic element in important places, like study titles in clinical trial registries.
    • Even if we managed to avoid the roadblocks above, readers would still be facing a bump in readability and would need to do additional cognitive work to find their way around an unnecessary ambiguity.

    My suggestion, then, is to translate “de novo” as “de novo início.” Adding “início” dissolves the “de novo” idiom, so the full phrase now means “of new onset.” The translation still refers to the Latin form, we nod to reviewers and specialists who are familiar with it, but the meaning is instantly clear to readers of all backgrounds.

  • Why should anyone specialize in medical translation or medical editing?

    Igor Dmitruk
    ,

    A few weeks ago I was having pizza with a group I don’t know well yet, and a colleague asked what I do for a living. When I told her, she asked, as most people do, whether I had studied medicine. When I said no, I studied English at university but chose to work with biomedical and regulatory documentation, she seemed perplexed and asked me why. The pizzeria was noisy and I was hungry so I mumbled something about the importance of specializing to advance in your career, and then we changed the subject.

    But why this and not that? If you must specialize as an editor or a translator, why medicine and pharmaceuticals and not engineering or art, humanities, or finance? If you’re a student or a professional considering a first or new specialization, you might wonder what’s interesting about those fields. So here are five reasons someone might have to seek specialization in medical translation and editing—or to avoid it completely.

    1. It’s complex.

    I like to conserve energy and have a good time like everyone else, but I tend to work better when I feel challenged, because on most days the opposite of striving is not bliss but boredom. Given the choice, I will always pick more complex projects to work on, and biomedical documentation offers plenty of those. Even if you have a life sciences background, and especially if you have an advanced degree that encapsulated you into a niche, this type of work will expose you to a myriad of new disease areas, therapeutics, and technologies—all supplemented by a high dose of complex regulation. Simply finding and using good reference information will already take time and be at least moderately challenging, so your brain will rarely suffer from lack of stimulus.

    More than cognitive exercise, this complexity also brings variety. On a single day you might work on cancer and immunology research in the morning, maybe translating and editing updates to regulatory submission documents. Just before lunch you may quickly review a death certificate. Then come two patient questionnaires in the afternoon, one about depression and the other about inflammatory bowel disease. Finally, just before five, you go back to a laboratory manual that must be ready and delivered by the next morning.

    2. It’s incremental.

    Some areas of pure technology develop at a disruptive pace. People working in these fields sometimes report fatigue from constantly working to understand information that is too new and often poorly documented—only to see their knowledge become obsolete in five years.

    I’m happy to report that this is not the case with biomedical documentation. Despite the challenges I mentioned above, the knowledge you gain from your daily toiling will pay good informational dividends in a decade. Their value will hold because biomedical research progresses at a relatively conservative pace. I started building my main medical glossary in 2013, and I’m now beyond 57,000 words (just pruned it yesterday with the help of a Python script). This glossary, which I compiled over thousands of hours, helps me do good work every day. It’s my pride and profit. A well researched and annotated term is a good investment because specialized terminology in some fields, like anatomy, might be in circulation for hundreds of years. That’s great news for terminology hoar—I mean, enthusiasts. That’s also why lingua medica often has its charming archaic flair.

    3. It’s interesting and useful.

    We all have a body, so knowledge we gain from constantly reading about anatomy, physiology, genetics, disease mechanisms and therapies is intrinsically interesting. It also helps us pay attention to our own health.

    People often tell me they’d become hypochondriac or pessimistic from reading about disease all the time. That didn’t happen to me. Over the years I have become more scrupulous, but also more accepting of the peculiarities of biology. At the same time, reading about novel therapies fills me with optimism.

    During the pandemic years my young daughter was diagnosed with congenital hearing loss. I naturally worried about her future as most parents would do. But then I went to journal repositories online and read widely about deafness: etiology, incidence, outlook, interventions etc. As a medical linguist, I had no difficulty to find reputable sources on this topic, and to link them to what I had studied about Psycholinguistics at university. That research brought me immense comfort and hope. More importantly, it gave me ideas for things I could start doing from day one to help my daughter flourish. Today her language skills are exceptional for her age. Perhaps part of that success comes from the good scientific information I found and processed at the right time.

    4. It contains stories.

    I often find stories hidden in the materials I translate and edit. Those are more common in pharmacovigilance reports and supporting documentation, such as hospital records and discharge notes, which often contain sections titled “medical history.” Repeated laboratory tests, hospital logs of procedures and monitoring, and death certificates also narrate stretches of a person’s life.

    Patient’s documents are anonymized for ethical and scientific reasons. But a batch of documents about someone identified by a code tells the story of a real person, with real relatives, often facing a serious disease or challenge. Sometimes the narrative (so aptly called in these reports) covers several years of investigations, discoveries, treatments, improvements and relapses.

    I felt moved by many such cases in the past, and would sometimes finish my work and shut down my computer with thoughts of empathy for patients and their families, sincerely wishing them health and comfort. And this leads me to my final argument below.

    5. It’s for a good cause.

    Working for the life sciences sector means you are often participating in the development and approval of new therapies, some of them for rare or complex diseases. That broader purpose, and the seriousness and responsibility it entails, should motivate you to strive for quality at work. It’s also a fuel to face some undesirable hardships of the job: tight deadlines, failing technologies, the carelessness of some peers. These ailments affect almost all modern work, but it helps to remember that you’re facing them for a good cause. It’s what I tell myself when a very large change-tracked Investigator’s Brochure—circulating for 12 years and treated very unorthodoxically by dozens of reviewers—crashes for the eleventh time on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon. The ancient parts of my brain start mounting a very rudimentary response of wrath that will demand computer = pieces. My prefrontal cortex steps in and says “Easy easy everyone, let’s just calm down and get back to work, we’re making important progress now by helping—hey you! Drop that now! We’re fighting disease and not each other so let’s cooperate, ok? Ok.”

  • Introduction

    Igor Dmitruk

    It has now been almost two decades since I became a translator, and then an editor, and then more generally a linguist as I kept expanding the scope of what I do as a language professional. For a long time I had this idea for a blog that I would call “The Lexical Files,” loosely inspired by The X-Files, where I would compile interesting anecdotes and “cases” from my daily investigations, which often are at an intersection between medicine, science, and language. The texts would be scientifically sound, linguistically intriguing, and genuinely engaging to read even for an audience that had no reason to be concerned with medical translation—just as I enjoy reading experts from different fields, from archaeology to computer science.

    That blog, sadly, never came to be: I got distracted, it would have been too much work, and I had no time for it. But this one that I’m writing now does exist. I just reduced the scope of the project and gave it a more modest name. I’m still as busy as ever, but I think the effort will produce something interesting.

    My intention with this blog, then, is to annotate and document my linguistic work and some of my discoveries, whether deliberate or serendipitous. I would also like to share some practical knowledge I accrued over the years in the hope that this helps someone to do their work more efficiently. As much as the internet can be a place of noise and distraction, I still managed to use it to learn important lessons from experienced colleagues when I was a new linguist myself. So it might be time for me to give something back.

    A few weeks ago I sat down with a notepad and wrote down ideas for a series of posts. Looking at that list, I suppose I will be writing about: translation, especially in the medical and scientific domain; editing and proofreading; terminology research and management; language technology; productivity tips and tricks for practicing professionals. I want this to be a practical blog, but I might also talk about language itself, not necessarily manifest as text. Finally, I might write about early music, another interest of mine, because I think it can be an amusing diversion*, and I would not want to create another blog to discuss just that.

    Producing more language than what I already do for a living is no trivial feat for my body, but I hope someone is paying attention and finds these notes useful, or at least moderately entertaining.

    * Fun language fact about fun: In some Romance languages, the words for “fun” (e.g., diversão, divertimento, diversión) descend very directly from “diversion.” From the Latin divértere: take a different, diverging path, stray away. So there’s an etymological cue on how to inject a bit of fun into your life, if needed.

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A blog about translation, editing, and writing in the the sciences.

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medical editing medical translation scientific translation translation specialization