La delgada línea entre los anglicismos y el español

Hacía mucho que no escribía en el blog y el otro día me hicieron dos preguntas para que debatiésemos sobre ellas. Así que voy a publicar mis dos pequeñas reflexiones aquí también.

English is the universal language but not the only one, then why translators use anglicisms in medical texts when we have a beautiful language full of Spanish terms?

It should be our duty to transmit the information and, therefore, allow the Spanish terms to stand out from the English ones facilitating an easier understanding to the reader.

Let me give you a few examples: estándar and terapia are clear calques from “standard” and “therapy”, instead of using words such as típico or habitual and tratamiento, respectively; disconfort is a common neologism, let’s use molestia or malestar; estrés is used so often that we tend to forget words like tensión or fatiga; “scanning” and “ratio” may seem slightly more difficult to translate but we only need to research a bit more in order to find barrido and relación; I like programa or aplicación informática more than “software”, don’t you too?; and finally but not least, what seems to be everyone’s favorite word “test” can be substituted for prueba.

In short, medical translators play a very important role in the development of the Spanish language. It is not a matter of eliminating the necessary anglicisms, but of trying to avoid those for which we have an alternative and tend not to be translated.