A medical device (or medical equipment, medical instrument, medical apparatus, as it is called in different English-speaking countries) is any instrument, device, equipment, software, implant, reagent, material, or other article intended by the manufacturer to be used in humans, for diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, prediction, prognosis, treatment or alleviation of disease, injury or disability. Medical devices are also intended for research, replacement, or modification of the anatomy or a physiological or pathological process or state or obtaining information by in vitro examination of specimens from the human body. The distinguishing characteristic of a medicinal device is that it does not exert its principal intended action within or on the surface of the human body by pharmacological, immunological, or metabolic mechanisms but to whose function such mechanisms may contribute. Products for the control or support of conception and products explicitly intended for the cleaning, disinfection or sterilisation of medical devices are also considered medical devices.

Medical devices, their constituent parts and materials, the properties that characterise them and the functions they perform are all referred to by their own, almost unique, terminology.

Knowing this terminology in the native language or its equivalent in another language is indispensable for translators, interpreters, proofreaders, and editors working with texts in which medical techniques and surgical interventions are mentioned.

Apart from the well-recognised and pioneering Spanish Guía de Productos Sanitarios (published in 1998 by the Clínica Universitaria de la Universidad de Navarra), which is a manual, and the G.M.D.N., U.M.D.N., E.M.D.N. and E.U.D.A.M.E.D. Nomenclatures (unknown to most professionals and some of which accessible only by expensive subscription), there are currently no monolingual medical device dictionaries in Spanish, and I dare say not in any other language either, to offer a list in alphabetical order of the different medical devices and describe their class, appearance and function. Only non-descriptive enumerations in hospital supply lists and a few glossaries with only a few dozen terms may be found.

This lack of a monolingual Spanish or bilingual English-Spanish dictionary of medical devices does not only affect translators, interpreters, proofreaders and medical writers at some point in their professional practice. It also affects those who translate from English into another language, as there are no bilingual dictionaries of medical devices in English combined with any other language.

Until now. I am pleased to present the first version of the Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices. This work is ambitious in its scope, and was born with the pretension and hope of alleviating these shortcomings and being helpful to users. The title describes exactly what it is and what its three main features are: it is a dictionary of medical devices, its entries are translated into six languages, and it is illustrated with descriptive imagens, because "a picture is worth a thousand words."

For those specialising in the medical field and working regularly or sporadically with texts on medical or surgical procedures, the descriptions and illustrations provided in this dictionary will help them understand the concept and use the correct term with less time consumption.

Medical translators and linguists who are not used to this type of text, translators of non-medical texts, translators of scientific articles, medical writers and science communicators, among others, will be able to take on jobs that require knowledge of the terminology of surgical instruments or other medical devices because they will now have a reference work to rely on.

Keywords, algorithms, metadata... this dictionary is helpful for publishers, lexicographers, automatic translation machines or search engines.

From a non-linguistic point of view, the information provided by the Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices may be of interest to students of Medicine, Nursing and related disciplines, as well as to general practitioners, specialists or doctors in the process of specialisation, as it may help them to study, explore new surgical techniques, understand texts written in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian or Portuguese, write articles, reports or collaborations in these languages, write articles for scientific publications or even identify medical instruments or devices using images.

Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of surgical instruments may also find this dictionary helpful for their catalogues and for promoting their products abroad. It may also benefit hospital departments responsible for purchasing surgical and medical equipment.

Finally, although this dictionary is aimed primarily at Spanish-speaking readers, it is useful for any native reader of English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese interested in knowing the equivalent in any of these languages or for those who translate into them

At the end of March 2018, in the online message board Medtrad, -a forum for professional biomedical translators, two colleagues with extensive experience in medical translation independently asked for help translating several names of surgical instruments from English into Spanish after having done an intensive search on their own. They proposed possible translations after having managed to find out what they looked like or what they were used for. Still, they had not been able to confirm in any bilingual dictionary that their proposals were correct: simply because such a dictionary did not exist.

Commenting on the difficulty of translating lists of medical (mainly surgical) material, one of them wrote: "Let's see if someone would like to make an EN-ES glossary of medical-surgical material as complete as possible for publication on Panace@." To which Fernando Navarro added: "Or, for that matter, a large bilingual dictionary of medical-surgical material for publication in Cosnautas."

Due to my professional surgical experience and the fact that I had been compiling a glossary of surgical terms in various languages for more than 20 years, I responded to the Medtrad forum offering to collaborate in the EN-ES dictionary of surgical material. But Fernando Navarro wrote to me: "Instead of 'collaborating,' because right now there is no dictionary in progress, it would be more a question of leading the project. Would you be willing to undertake the compilation of an illustrated EN-ES dictionary of medical devices?"

And I was encouraged. Because the idea had been in my head for many years. I started "collecting" terms in 2000 when the manufacturers Aesculap and Martin kindly responded to my request and sent me two general catalogues of surgical instruments: two hardbound books with images of instruments and their names translated into four languages. The collection of surgical terms continued to grow over the years. At the same time, I built up a collection of words of medical and surgical equipment with their English equivalents, which had grown considerably since 2020 when I prepared the first online course “Translation of Medical Devices”, which I continue to teach at AulaSIC. The idea of one day publishing a bilingual dictionary of medical-surgical equipment was in my plans, but I lacked the impetus to take the first step and start the process.

Knowing that the future dictionary would have an interested audience, that Fernando Navarro was promoting it and that Cosnautas would publish it together constituted that necessary impulse.

This dictionary is not the work of a lexicographer or a philologist but of a medical doctor with more than thirty-six years of professional activity in medical translation and a long career in medical devices. It is the work of a medical translator designed for medical translators: designed from the point of view of a medical translator, based on the needs and interests of a medical translator and aimed at supporting medical language professionals.

Compiling this multilingual illustrated dictionary of medical devices has been a triple challenge: first, collecting terms from a vast thematic field with more than 15,000 different types of medical devices. Secondly, to find the Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish equivalent of each English term. And thirdly, to find illustrations for most of the entries.

The thousands of medical device terms that make up this dictionary include surgical instruments, suture materials, probes and catheters, electro-medical devices, active and inactive implants, orthopaedic surgery materials, dental instruments and devices, in vitro diagnostic products, prostheses and technical aids, hospital furniture and clothing, among others. In origin, an English-Spanish dictionary of surgical instruments was to be published, so in this first version, there will probably be a more significant number of entries referring to these products. However, an effort has been made to balance the presentation of other types of medical devices, and in future versions, terms related to products of all specialties will be added.

Numerous entries refer to parts of instruments or apparatus or the materials they are composed of. And to those surgeons who gave their names to the essential instruments, of whom brief biographies are provided.

The selection of the Spanish equivalents has been based on the frequency of actual use. However, this has not prevented the rejection of linguistically or conceptually incorrect ones, in which case a mention is made in the "Observations" section. When within the same meaning, the English or Spanish lemma can be expressed with different terms of similar meaning, these are listed in the sections "Synonymy (en)" and "Synonymy (es)," respectively.

It is a descriptive dictionary, as most articles include a "Description" section, which explains the type of medical device, its appearance, and its function so that the medical translator consulting the dictionary can be sure that the equivalent in the desired language corresponds to the lemma consulted.

The instructions for the use of a medical device can be veritable gibberish, and the difficulty in translating them does not only lie in finding the equivalent of the name in the corresponding language. Translators must also find out what the acronyms and abbreviations mentioned in the text mean, what the anatomical terms, the names of diseases and surgical procedures refer to... and find the equivalent in the target language.

Hundreds of descriptions in this dictionary are therefore expanded by cross-references to names of surgical procedures, technical or laboratory procedures, diseases, anatomical structures, symbols, units of measurement, institutions, etc., all of which have their own entries in the dictionary.

Also included are frequent phrases and expressions that are difficult to translate, taken from medical device user manuals and manufacturers' and distributors' catalogues, which tend to be sloppy texts (often the result of non-edited automatic translations into English), with a lot of acronyms, lines made up of unconnected words or single phrases without context.

The dictionary presents starting lemmas in English translated into five languages - Spanish, French, German, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese - the translation of which has been edited by native or bilingual translators. The main pair is English-Spanish, so it is in the latter language that the descriptions and observations are presented, when necessary, as well as the labelling of the illustrations. Spanish has been used because it is the author's mother tongue and because the structure of the dictionary is based mainly on European Union regulations and directives concerning medical devices. Where diatopic variations are known to exist, they are incorporated into the dictionary and marked with the abbreviation of the corresponding Spanish-speaking country written in superscript. In the case of Portuguese, preference has been given to the Brazilian variant over the Portuguese one to satisfy more users.

All acronyms or abbreviations of English headwords have their own entry in the dictionary, and a clickable hyperlink to their development is provided.

An essential feature of this dictionary is the incorporation of illustrations labelled in English and Spanish, showing an instrument or device, and describing its different parts. The images are intended to support the text of the corresponding article by expanding the description of the product and to be helpful to the translator, who will be able to confirm that it is the same medical device in English and the equivalent entry in their own language. Each picture shall accompany its related lemma, and illustrations showing the parts of a product in detail shall be represented in the appendix "Parts of...".

As it is published on a digital platform, the Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices is a living dictionary. It will be expanded with new entries, corrected, and updated in successive versions periodically published on Cosnautas. Collaboration from users, pointing out errors or omissions and providing comments and suggestions through the online "Help us improve!" forms will be very welcome. Contribution of diatopic variations to the different headwords would be of particular interest.

The entries in the Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices follow are based on one of the following models:

1. Monosemic entry with simple equivalence
2. Polysemous entry with several meanings
3. Entry with a referral (single or multiple) to another, where equivalence is offered
4. Mixed polysemous entry, with meanings offering equivalence and meanings referring to another entry
5. Entry (monosemous or polysemous) which also incorporates complex forms

The Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices can be consulted online with a search engine that has four boxes arranged horizontally: the first box for the search criteria (with a drop-down for the seven search criteria); the second, empty, for typing in the term to be searched for; the third, the "Search" button; and the fourth, the "Advanced" button:

The search engine offers the following seven search criteria:

1. English term
This is the default option, which allows you to find an entry in the dictionary, whether a simple term (e.g., forceps) or a complex term (e.g., forceps blade). From the second letter typed by the user, the search engine displays on the screen a drop-down menu with the first ten dictionary entries beginning with the sequence of letters typed; if the searched entry is among them, it can be selected with the mouse without further typing.

2. Entry containing...
This option lets you search for simple and complex entries containing a given term. A search for an instrument with this criterion returns not only the entry instrument but also other entries beginning with instrument (e.g., instrument cart), ending with instrument (e.g., carbide instrument) or including that term (e.g., articulated instrument holding arm).

3. Spanish term
The Illustrated Multilingual Dictionary of Medical Devices is not intended as a Spanish-English reverse dictionary. Still, this search criterion allows you to find the corresponding entries with the English lemma from any Spanish equivalents in the dictionary.

4. French term
This search criterion allows you to find the corresponding entries with the English term from any French equivalence in the dictionary.

5. German term
This search criterion allows you to find the corresponding entries with the English lemma from any German equivalence in the dictionary.

5. Italian term

This search criterion allows you to find the corresponding entries with the English motto from any Italian equivalent in the dictionary.

7. Portuguese term
This search criterion allows you to find the corresponding English entries with the English term from any Portuguese equivalents in the dictionary.

8. Complete dictionary allows you to find English terms in the headword list and the Synonymy (en) and Description fields. A search for a stapler with this criterion returns a list with all the entries containing the typed term (see above, criterion 2), but also entries such as a procedure for prolapse and hemorrhoids, whose Description field contains a phrase that reads "mediante grapadora circular (P.P.H. stapler) cuyas grapas fijan las hemorroides prolapsadas. "

The Advanced Search contains a drop-down menu with six search criteria:

1.English term
2.Spanish term
3.French term
4.Italian term
5.Portuguese term
6.Classification filter

Paz Gómez Polledo holds a Ph.D. in Medicine and Surgery from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) (1987).

During the last three years of her medical studies, she was a student intern in the General Surgery and Digestive Pathology Services III and IV of the Hospital Clínico Universitario de San Carlos (Madrid) and the following four years she was a member of surgical teams in the Hospital de San Pedro, Clínica San Francisco and Clínica S.E.A.R (also in Madrid).

In 1992 she obtained the National Certification in Surgical Technology, awarded by the Liaison Council on Certification for the Surgical Technologist (Englewood, CO, U.S.A.).

She has been working as a medical translator, proofreader, and editor since 1986 and has been teaching medical translation courses, including two on specialised translation of medical devices (AulaSIC) since 2007.

• To Fernando A. Navarro, co-founding partner of Cosnautas and author of the indispensable Diccionario de dudas y dificultades de traducción del inglés médico, from whom I have been learning ever since I met him more than 25 years ago. For being the one who gave me the push I needed to get my project off the ground by inviting me to prepare a dictionary of medical devices for Cosnautas. And, especially, for selflessly offering me his experience with the operation of the lexicographical programme used in preparing this dictionary. Over the last four years, he has helped me countless times and has patiently and generously given me his valuable time whenever I had a doubt or a problem.
• To José Antonio de la Riva, director of Cosnautas, for his continuous support and tremendous willingness to provide me with all the necessary human and material resources.
• To Javier Orellana, a computer scientist at Cosnautas, responsible for the technical development, for his excellent work, without which the digital publication of this work would not have been possible.
• To the reviewers of the translation of the entries included in the dictionary - Giada Atzeni (Italian), Gisela Grosselfinger (German), Eñaut Urrestarazu (French) and Carla Vorsatz (Brazilian Portuguese) - for their outstanding work.
• To Verónica Saladrigas Isenring, external collaborator at Cosnautas and author of the English-Spanish Dictionary of Clinical Research, for the help she gave me in getting started with the lexicographic programme.
• To B. Braun, one of the world's leading suppliers of medical-surgical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare services, for allowing me to freely use product images from their catalogues to illustrate this dictionary.
• And, most significantly, to my family: my husband, Jorge Manzanares, for his valuable advice, and my daughters Marta and Laura, also translators, for their ideas and help in computer matters. I dedicate this work to all three of them because, over the last four years, they have suffered my almost obsessive dedication to the preparation of this dictionary, giving me in return their continuous support and affection and encouragement in moments of weakness.

Acknowledged contributors to version 1.02

• Rossella Cordone
• Francisco Díaz
• Gisela Grosselfinger Vogel
• Anastasia Mishina
• María de la Rubia

Acknowledgements to those who provided suggestions for additions or improvements to version 1.03:

• Yvonne Becker
• Jorge Esteban Casas
• Gisela Grosselfinger Vogel
• Mar Jiménez-Quesada
• Agustina Luján de la Torre
• María José Nägler
• Anthony Palomo
• Esther Paraíso Seguí
• Mavi Sormani

The following professional translators have been involved in the translation and revision of the German, French, Italian and Portuguese equivalents of this 1.03 version:

• Giada Atzeni (Italian)
• Debora Branco (Portuguese)
• Gisela Grosselfinger Vogel (German)
• Eñaut Urrestarazu Aizpurua (French)