Contributions of the philosophy of science to juridical semantics

Persian medical terminology

together with: Sarkarati

This paper is a preliminary study of Persian Medical terms which sheds light on the issue of Persian scientific Language. This investigation of the status of Persian medical terms is done by reviewing the Persian translated version of the book: "Principles of Internal Medicine" written by Harrison. The book is the coursebook of almost all medical students in Iran and is organized in six volumes each related to a different branch of medicine. The unorganized situation of medical terms in Persian is tried to be shown in this study. Medical terminology used in Persian is an amalgam of Persian, English, French and rarely Arabic terms. The overview of the study is to separate the terminology of each language and establish an independent separate Persian medical Terminology.
The first step is to list the Persian medical terms and foreign medical terms used in the translation separately, and the next is to answer the following questions:
-How much does the translator use foreign medical terms?

-How much do they use Persian medical terms?

-Do the translators have a common usage pattern of terms?

-Do the foreign terms used in the translation have Persian equivalents?

Divasson, Lourdes
Discoursal flaws in medical abstracts written in English by Spanish-speaking scientists
together with: Isabel León Peréz
Introduction. An Abstract has been defined as the window of work available for easy evaluation. Well-structured medical Abstracts have been suggested with the aim of fulfilling three major purposes: improving literature searching, informing researchers and professionals, and facilitating peer review. Unfortunately, non-native speakers of English in particular fail to pay Abstracts they write in English the degree of attention they deserve. Several studies show that many of them are unstructured, deficiently structured, or present an illogical order of the different moves, leading to a less clear presentation of information contents. Besides, Abstracts are frequently incomplete or lengthy, even misleading and purposely vague.
Objective. The aim of this research is to contribute to pay a closer attention to the way Abstracts are written in English by Spanish scientists, and thus, improve their structuring and linguistic realisation.
Material and Method. To this purpose, we have analysed the English version of the Abstracts in 30 Research Papers (RPs) on Internal Medicine, from the leading Spanish journals in this field, and published between 1999 and 2000. With regard to their move analysis, Abstracts were classified as unstructured, semistructured, and more completely structured. We have also assessed the amount of informational content in every Abstract by giving a unitary mark of 1 for each clear, well developed heading constituting every Abstract (Objective, Design, Setting, Subjects, Interventions, Measurements, Conclusions, as proposed by the Ad Hoc Working Group for the Critical Appraisal of Medical Literature for RPs).
Results.- Few of the studied Abstracts are fully structured and many present different flaws. On the other hand, our results lead us to believe that the informational content of an Abstract improves in quantity and clearness if it is completely structured.

Donadio, Paolo

New labour, new media – UK politics on the Net

together with: Francesca Vaghi

Political communication on the net brings new challenges to linguists, analysts of political behaviour, sociologists, and scholars in media communication. Can we hold as true Negroponte's statement (Being Digital, 1995) about the 'evaporation' of the nation-state under the influence of new technologies? Between those who believe in an enhancement of community and those who label the net-revolution as a populist orienting of political power, as Bimber puts it ("The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism", Polity, XXXI, 1, 1998), we can start to see how English language follows the changes imposed by the medium. United Kingdom appears as a paradigmatic case in Europe, since new technologies have shaped political information and language now has comply with new purposes. New Labour, under Blair's leadership, has dramatically exploited net's possibilities since the publication of Communicating Britain's Future in 1994. The document related net's potential influence on politics with the global diffusion of English language and now Blair's United Kingdm is at the forefront in this field. Ideologies do not die but find new shapes through the words on the net: following the pragmatic framework on politeness by Brown and Levinson (Politeness, 1987), I will try to find out what sort of linguistic interaction, focusing on the differences, is adopted by Conservatives, New Labour and Liberal Democrats on their official sites.

Dumont, Yvette

Enseignement de la Physiologie en anglais a l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
En janvier 1999, le président de l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 nous a fait part d’un projet du ministre d’encourager la pratique des langues étrangères dans l’enseignement supérieur. L’objectif est de créer des universités européennes en demandant à des collègues anglophones d’enseigner en anglais des disciplines du cursus de Lyon 1. Pour ce faire, la fédération Santé de Lyon 1, regroupant 4 facultés de Médecine a choisi la Physiologie comme la discipline la mieux adaptée à cette expérience. Le collège de Physiologie et le Centre Commun d’Enseignement des Langues ont mis au point des modalités spécifiques d’enseignement de la Physiologie en anglais et, en parallèle, un programme de soutien pédagogique sous forme de travaux pratiques pour parer aux difficultés linguistiques des étudiants.
Le dispositif se déroule en 3 séquences :

1- 2 cours magistraux de 1 heure de Physiologie en anglais filmés et enregistrés.

8 heures de soutien pédagogique basé sur les vidéos et les documents écrits.

2- 9 cours magistraux de 1 heure de Physiologie en anglais avec soutien pédagogique en parallèle

Les supports écrits en français et en anglais ainsi que les vidéos sont mis à la disposition des étudiants.

3- Physiologie : examen en français.

Anglais : examen portant en partie sur l’anglais de la Physiologie.
Cette expérience a suscité un tel intérêt de la part des enseignants et surtout chez les étudiants qui sont enfin confrontés à une pratique authentique de la langue qu’il a été décidé de la poursuivre régulièrement en 3° année avec l’hématologie.
L’objet de cette communication est de décrire les objectifs, supports, les méthodes d’évaluation et les moyens techniques mis en œuvre et de soumettre les premiers enseignements que l’on peut tirer de cette expérience.

Eckkrammer, Mag. Dr. Eva Martha