The role of registerial expertise in texture re-creation in medical translation

Abstract

This article investigates how an important aspect of translators’ registerial expertise — domain-specific (medical) training and experience — may have consequences for the texture of a specialised translation, i.e. the translations of the Chinese medicine classic Huang Di Nei Jing. Through a fine-grained analysis of cohesion and coherence, this study demonstrates that a translator with a higher level of domain-specific expertise tends to produce a translation (i) that is more lexically explicit and cohesively harmonious, (ii) with a richer semantic variety, more extended cohesive chains and cross-chain interactions and (iii) having a higher degree of definitiveness. The findings suggest that a translator’s domain-specific expertise could have measurable consequences for the texture of the target text.