Christine Andersen wrote:
In short, you need to be a LINGUIST who understands medicine, however you acquire your knowledge of medicine (reading texts in the target language or the source, practising, whatever).
Interestingly, although their data compares translators who studied only medicine, who studied only linguistics, and who studied both medicine and linguistics, they classify medical translators entirely differently in their introduction (which I thought weird).
In their introduction, they distinguish between amateur translators (i.e. who studied only medicine and not linguistics) and professional translators (i.e. who studied linguistics, regardless of whether they studied medicine or picked up their medical knowledge by simply doing it). I'm not sure how the classification used in their introduction relates to the classification they used when compiling their data -- they seem to be incompatible.
The chances are that a good linguist can become a good medical translator, and some medics who are not also trained linguists are also good translators. ... My guess is that both medical professionals and translators stop taking exams at some stage, but the good ones never stop studying in either profession. ...So in fact, the good translators have studied both medicine and liguistics, and they are the best at applying what they have studied.
I don't see how you could have reached that conclusion.
In fact, the data shows that having studied both medicine and linguistics (as opposed to having studied only the one or the other) does not seem to influence whether the translator is good or bad. You get good translators who studied both, and you get bad translators who studied both.
The only relation between type of study and quality of translation (as measured in terms of linguistic errors) is that medical translators who didn't study linguistics tend to make much fewer linguistic errors than medical translators who didn't study medicine.
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