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.