Healthcare and medical education through language: a comparative research of translation equivalents

A highly-trained medical practitioner should possess extensive professional expertise, skills and competence which involve some basic understanding of world healthcare systems’ structures, functions and healthcare practitioners who provide medical services. Our research focuses on the way a healthcare and a medical education systems as social institutes are reflected in the language. The hypothesis is that a linguistic comparative study could provide a deeper insight into a foreign culture including its medical and educational domains. The objective of our research is to investigate similarities and differences of British and Russian healthcare and education systems by defining basic vocabulary items naming British and Russian Medical Practitioners and People in Medical Education. The research procedure included several stages. The first stage involved a selection of English vocabulary corpus consisting of 15 nouns naming British medical practitioners and positions in medical education. At the next stage each item was supplied by an English definition and a Russian translation equivalent if any. Then the English and Russian items were compared regarding their definitions and translation equivalents. Linguistic methods and research in general and a comparative linguistic analysis in particular can be effectively used in professional competence development as well as in a widening of cultural horizons. The vocabulary corpus and definitions could be taught in EFL classes to Russian students of medicine.