DDD

1 Preface to the fourth edition (2022)

Fernando A. Navarro

2 Introduction (2000)

Fernando A. Navarro

There is no doubt that in the world of general and specialised dictionaries, translators are spoilt for choice. Considering the sheer number of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, I am sure that many readers will be surprised and somewhat sceptical about the publication of this Diccionario crítico de dudas inglés-español de medicina^†:

“What? Not another dictionary! And what a weird title!”

In the course of this introduction, I hope to convince you that a dictionary of this nature is not only necessary – I can almost hear the critics saying “it fills a gap in the bibliography” – but also that it simply has to have this title. However strange and exotic it initially sounds, the title is certainly not the result of a rash decision or fleeting fancy. Let us dissect the title, word by word.

 * This “Introduction” is reproduced verbatim from the first edition, with a few minimal changes to adapt it to the typographical and formatting changes of the third edition.

^† This was the title of the work in its first two editions (Madrid: McGraw·Hill-Interamericana, 2000 and 2005); for the Cosnautas electronic edition (2013), I decided to change it to Diccionario de dudas y dificultades de traducción del inglés médico, and this is the form I will use from now on whenever I refer to it in this introduction.

3 Why yet another dictionary?

4 Why a dictionary of doubts?

Just ask any translator faced with the following sentence: Anthrax is an infectious animal disease that is transmitted to veterinarians by contact with animals. Knowing full well that medical language is essentially international and draws heavily on the classical languages, our hypothetical translator will suspect from the outset that the English anthrax may well correspond to the Spanish ‘ántrax’, even without ever having heard either of these technical terms or knowing what they mean. Bilingual medical dictionaries will confirm that assumption, yet nothing could be further from the truth: what English-speaking doctors call anthrax is what we call ‘carbunco’ and, conversely, our ‘ántrax’ is the English carbuncle. Both infectious diseases cause skin lesions and have similar etymological origins (the former from the Greek ἄνθραξ, ‘coal’; the latter from the Latin carbunculus, ‘small coal’), but they differ considerably both in the causative bacteria (Bacillus anthracis in the case of carbunco; staphylococci in the case of ántrax) and in their prognosis and treatment.

Situations like this are precisely what this Diccionario de dudas y dificultades sets out to resolve. If we look up the entry for anthrax, which will serve to illustrate a typical entry in this dictionary, we find the following:

Immediately after the headword that opens the entry we find, in square brackets, an abbreviation indicating the specific field concerned; in this case, “microbiology, parasitology and infectious diseases” (the meaning of these abbreviations is explained in the corresponding key). Next, the body of the entry gives the correct translation and adds a brief comment on the difference between ‘ántrax’ and ‘carbunco’. The symbol ◘ marks an English sentence that illustrates the use and meaning of the word under discussion in a broader context. The symbol ● introduces a series of multi-word expressions containing the headword that are difficult or misleading to translate, listed in alphabetical order. Finally, the symbol ►► introduces various usage notes on the translation of anthrax. To make every expression easy to find in the dictionary, phrases containing the headword have their own entry; so anyone searching the dictionary for, say, the correct translation of inhalational anthrax will find the following:

The symbol → refers the reader to the entry anthrax, where the expression sought will be found after the symbol ●: inhalational anthrax (carbuncosis pulmonar). This same cross-reference symbol → followed by a word in turquoise is also used to indicate that the translation of a word is explained in an entirely different entry, as in the case of virilizing → masculinization, which indicates that the translation problems posed by the English word virilizing are discussed in the entry for masculinization.

But the doubts referred to in the title of my dictionary are not limited to what translators call ‘treacherous words’ or ‘false friends’ (faux amis); that is, words spelt very similarly or identically in English and Spanish but with different meanings in the two languages, such as physic (which is not ‘física’ but ‘medicina’), plague (not ‘plaga’ but ‘peste bubónica’), labor (not ‘labor’ but ‘parto’) or matron (not ‘matrona’ but ‘directora de enfermería’). Another constant source of doubt for translators is Anglicisms such as rash, odds ratio, immunoblot, piercing, stent, distress or by-pass, for which there is supposedly no Spanish equivalent.

In translation, the pull of the original printed text may also lead us to use an expression in Spanish that, while not strictly incorrect, is jarring because it is so unusual. Let us look at an example from everyday language: what would we think if someone translated information technology or computer science as ‘tecnología de la información’ or ‘ciencia de las computadoras’? These expressions are clearly not incorrect, but it is equally clear that in Spain, outside careless translations, everyone calls the science of computers ‘informática’. The same is true in medicine of expressions such as human milk (leche materna, rather than ‘leche humana’), weight loss (adelgazamiento, rather than ‘pérdida de peso’), high blood pressure (hipertensión arterial, rather than ‘presión sanguínea alta’) or liver cell (hepatocito, rather than ‘célula hepática’).

A problem related in some ways to the one discussed in the previous paragraph is posed by polysemous English words. Since many of them have a similar equivalent in Spanish, translators reach for it time and again, without realising that it may be perfectly correct for one of the word’s senses but not for all the others. Thus, the English knife can mean ‘cuchillo’, but in surgery it is mainly used in the sense of ‘bisturí’; and matters become more complicated with words such as abuse or examination, which can be found with very different meanings: child abuse (malos tratos a menores), spousal abuse (violencia conyugal), alcohol abuse (alcoholismo), heroin abuser (heroinómano), self-abuse (automutilación, autolesión or masturbación, depending on the context); clinical examination (exploración física), fundus examination (oftalmoscopia), pelvic examination (tacto vaginal), postmortem examination (necropsia, autopsia), ultrasound examination (ecografía). In such cases, the dictionary distinguishes the different senses within a single entry with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. in turquoise, as in the following example:

Incidentally, we can see once again that the simplistic translation ‘ligamento anular’ found in the usual medical dictionaries may well be very convenient, but it falls frankly short for the medical translator.

Here, I would like to clarify that the concept of ‘doubt’ in this dictionary does not coincide with its meaning in everyday language. This dictionary does not, of course, set out to cover every doubt that medical translators may encounter in the course of their work. When faced with an English medical text, translators may well not know the meaning of a huge number of words. However, I do not believe that these words pose a major danger, because their very apparent difficulty will prompt translators to consult specialised dictionaries and reference books to clarify their meaning. The biggest danger lies in the English words or expressions that seem easy and are therefore translated literally, which often leads to incorrect, uncertain, problematic or less-than-ideal translations in Spanish. Those are the ‘doubts’ discussed in this dictionary.

5 Why a critical dictionary?

6 Why an English–Spanish dictionary?

For almost half a century, English has been the indisputable global language of medicine. I feel I could almost skip this section of the introduction because it is so obvious that nowadays, a medical translator absolutely has to understand English. Not only is English the source language of most translations; it is also the lingua franca of the main text books and cutting-edge journals in every field of medicine. In other words, medical translators who do not understand English may well find it impossible to solve doubts that arise when translating a medical text in French, German or any other modern language.

And this, of course, will be in addition to the multitude of doubts and misleading or challenging words that they will have to decipher when translating a medical text from French or German. However, I thought it was particularly urgent to publish, at long last, the dictionary of English–Spanish doubts that medical translators had been clamouring for for years, without which I can now hardly imagine translating effectively.

Since I am referring to medical translators as the natural beneficiaries of this dictionary, I would like to point out that my definition of this professional function is all-embracing. Translation is not included in a medical student’s training, and few doctors have become medical translators, as I have. However, most Spanish and Latin American doctors have done many informal translations during their training and later on in their career. It is an undeniable fact that the majority of today’s medical publications in Spanish are the outcome of texts that were originally written in English. Not only am I referring to medical text books edited in Spanish-speaking countries, a quarter of which are translations of foreign works. I am also particularly referring to the fact that more than 80% of the references of articles published in specialised Spanish medical journals are in English. We should acknowledge, therefore, that in countries like ours, where science plays a supporting role to the main English-speaking actors, every medical author also has to be a translator to a great extent. And, in my opinion, it is not too far-fetched to think that in a few years’ time – as was the case one generation ago with the history of medicine – medical translation and writing might be duly recognised as medical specialties in their own right.

I would also like to answer another question that I am sure many of you will be asking by now:

“OK, an English–Spanish dictionary, but which flavours of English and Spanish?”

My decision, like many others I have made with this dictionary, was largely determined by my personal circumstances. As a medical translator with broad experience working with multinational pharmaceutical companies and international organisations, I am only too familiar with having to tackle words that have different meanings, depending on which side of the Atlantic they hail from.

As you probably know, the word billion means a million million in England, but only a thousand million in the United States; pants are underpants for an English lord, but long trousers for a Californian; a gallon is equal to 4.55 litres in Britain, but only 3.79 litres in America; a nursing-home is a private clinic in England, but a residential home for the elderly in the United States; MD is a doctoral qualification at Oxford, but a bachelor’s degree at Harvard; and a US Surgeon General is the chief medical officer of the public health service, while his English namesake is the most senior medical officer of the Navy.

You will also be aware of spelling differences between British and American English. In general, translators need not worry that doctors in London write tumour and haematology, while their colleagues in New York use tumor and hematology. These trivialities rarely matter when you are translating into Spanish. But sometimes they do. A British anaesthetist, for example, has the same training as his or her Spanish counterpart (in other words, they are doctors specialised in anaesthesia), while an American anesthetist is a professional individual, but not a qualified doctor, who is registered to administer anaesthesia to patients. (A US doctor specialised in anaesthesia would be called an anesthesiologist.)

These and other differences in meanings between American (and usually Canadian) English and British English (which is also used in many other countries in the world) are included in this dictionary, preceded by their respective abbreviations [US] and [GB].

However, with regard to Spanish differences on either side of the Atlantic, in the first edition of this dictionary, I used just the opposite approach. Since I was born and bred in Spain, and undertook my medical training at the University of Salamanca and at the Marqués de Valdecilla Hospital in Santander, it was logical for my dictionary to weigh heavily towards the medical language used in Spanish faculties, hospitals and clinics, scientific journals and text books. Thirteen years later, my personal knowledge of the geographical variants of Spanish has increased exponentially, and, as a result, I have paid much more attention to variants in this edition of Diccionario de dudas y dificultades, as explained in more detail at the end of the “Preface to the third edition” (see above).

7 Why a medical dictionary?

While it is perfectly reasonable for a reader to ask this question, in my opinion it is unnecessary to do so. As a medical specialist by training and a medical translator by career, it would have been quite illogical for me to write a dictionary on heraldry, beekeeping, plumbing or Etruscan art (with all due respect, of course, for the experts in these fields).

Unfortunately, writing a medical dictionary is not that simple, because it has to include a host of common but misleading words found in medical texts that do not strictly belong to the medical sphere. Examples of such words are actual (real), American (estadounidense), library (biblioteca), vegetables (verduras) and November (noviembre), which medical translators will find time and time again in their texts. And, for the same reason, you will find thousands of entries that do not belong to the field of medicine itself but to many other similar or complementary sciences, such as pharmacy, chemistry, biostatistics, zoology, botany, genetics, molecular biology, history of medicine, bibliology, law, etc.

Some readers may think that, in that case, it would have been more correct to call this dictionary a “biomedical dictionary”, a “dictionary of health sciences” or similar fashionable title. I deliberately chose not to. When you become familiar with this dictionary, you will realise – I hope – that one of its flagship features is its condemnation of unnecessary or deliberately misconstrued euphemisms. I do not agree with the advertising tactics of pharmaceutical companies, which have stopped using ‘medicine’ (replacing it with ‘health’ to avoid any negative connotation with illness or pain) and ‘chemistry’ (to avoid any subconscious association with carcinogenic E numbers or pollution). Nor do I like the process by which big pharma, later followed by the rest of the international medical community, has gradually replaced ‘toxicity’, a term that was used to denote a medicinal product’s ability to produce toxic effects, initially coming up with ‘tolerability’, a word with less negative connotations, and finally arriving at ‘safety’, a word with a clearly positive ring to it.

Personally, as a doctor, I have often consulted dictionaries on botany, biochemistry, genetics or pharmacy to expand my knowledge. Therefore, I hope that my colleagues in other fields will welcome a new medical dictionary, in the broadest sense of the term. I have every confidence that this medical English dictionary will be exceptionally useful, not only for doctors and medical students, but also for biologists, pharmacists, chemists and, above all, specialised translators and scientific writers.

8 Conventions on grammatical gender

In Spanish, unlike in English, grammatical gender is a vital syntactic function that expresses agreement among nouns, adjectives, some pronouns, articles and certain participles used as adjectives. Grammatical gender poses major challenges for lexicographers, particularly with regard to nouns that name persons.

      In a bilingual dictionary, it is fairly easy to denote the grammatical gender of inanimate nouns, since most objects have a single form and explicit gender: biopsia, for example, is always feminine; quirófano is always masculine. In a bilingual dictionary, it is therefore easy to state that “biopsy is biopsia” and “operation room is quirófano”.

      However, in the case of nouns that name persons, most have a double gender form in Spanish (e.g., el cardiólogo and la cardióloga, el bioquímico and la bioquímica) or they are invariant with an implicit gender (e.g., el dentista and la dentista, el psiquiatra and la psiquiatra). Very few nouns that are invariant with explicit gender can be used for both biological sexes without changing the grammatical gender. This is true of masculine (e.g., bebé, cadáver, personaje, ser) and feminine nouns alike (e.g., criatura, familia, gente, persona, víctima).

      Nouns naming persons that undergo gender-related changes are a major problem for bilingual dictionaries. Some dictionaries opt to use an inclusive masculine form. This strategy is very common in general spoken language when referring to a person whose sex is not yet known (e.g., “espero que en este hospital haya un ginecólogo de guardia”). These dictionaries state, for example, that “neurologist is neurólogo”, running the risk that their strategy may be misinterpreted as gender bias against women. Other dictionaries, on the other hand, prefer to expand the double forms and state that “neurologist is neurólogo o neuróloga” or they opt for a double abbreviated form, “neurologist is neurólogo/-ga”.

      These two alternatives for solving Spanish gender variance work quite well in monolingual dictionaries (where they are used as isolated headwords) and in simple bilingual dictionaries (where direct equivalents are usually given in the form of one- or two-word entries). However, in complex bilingual dictionaries that provide a range of compound expressions, these strategies become cumbersome and confusing. For example, a good surgeon becomes un buen cirujano, una buena cirujana (not to mention un/a buen/a cirujano/­na!). Even more long-winded and convoluted are explanatory sentences with nouns, adjectives and articles that all express gender agreement. A sentence such as “Además del médico adjunto y el auxiliar administrativo, solamente pueden estar presentes el paciente ingresado y un amigo íntimo o un familiar cercano“ should reflect all its variants: ”Además de la médica adjunta y el auxiliar administrativo, solamente pueden estar presentes la paciente ingresada y un amigo íntimo o una familiar cercana“, ”Además del médico adjunto y la auxiliar administrativa, solamente pueden estar presentes el paciente ingresado y una amiga íntima o un familiar cercano“, ”Además de la médica adjunta y la auxiliar administrativa, solamente pueden estar presentes la paciente ingresada y un amigo o amiga íntimos o una familiar cercana“ and scores of other possibilities that the Spanish language contemplates. Instead of increasing the reader’s understanding, these strategies actually further confuse the issue. Worse still would be a double expanded option (“Además del médico adjunto o la médica adjunta y el auxiliar administrativo o la auxiliar administrativa, solamente pueden estar presentes el paciente ingresado o la paciente ingresada y un amigo íntimo o una amiga íntima o un familiar cercano o una familiar cercana“) or a double abbreviated option (”Además del/de la médico/­ca adjunto/­ta y el/la auxiliar administrativo/-va, solamente pueden estar presentes el/la paciente ingresado/-da y un/a amigo/-ga íntimo/-ma o un/a familiar cercano/-na“).

      The options for nouns that name persons also apply to all English adjectives for persons and things, but with an even greater degree of complexity. This is because adjectives have gender and number in Spanish, but not in English. An adjective such as white, for example, would be blanca in white skirt (falda blanca), but blancos in white trousers (pantalones blancos). So, in an exhaustive bilingual dictionary, it would no longer suffice to say that white means blanco, as is usually the case, but white means blanco, blanca, blancos or blancas or, in the abbreviated form, white means blanco(s)/-ca(s). Again, this is extremely cumbersome and confusing, which is just what a dictionary seeks to avoid.

      Therefore, the time-honoured practice in the history of lexicography is to tend towards simplicity and clarity over exhaustiveness. Everyone who regularly uses a monolingual dictionary will know, for example, that bisturíes has to be searched for as bisturí, because it does not have its own entry. Likewise, soy, eras, fue, seremos and serían have to be searched for as ser; librito as libro; dificilísimo as difícil, and so on and so forth.

      I have never heard anyone suggest that searching for different verb forms using the infinitive shows bias against past, present, future or imperative conjugations. And no one contends that finding Spanish plurals only by searching for singulars implies a number bias that might empower the individualistic nature of our modern capitalist society against the plurality and sense of community that is defended by the social revolution of Christianity or anarchism. Everyone readily understands that these are mere conventions of usage, designed to simplify dictionary searches, with an eminently practical purpose. So it should not be hard to interpret grammatical gender conventions the same way, as simple grammatical conventions designed for practicality.

      In the Dictionary of Doubts and Difficulties in English Medical Translation, I have sought to avoid the long-windedness of expanding each and every Spanish grammatical gender variant of an English term or phrase. I have therefore opted to apply the following conventions:

1. For headwords and compound expressions (denoted by the symbol ●), I have given the Spanish equivalent in an inclusive or generic single gender form. In line with general Spanish usage, the inclusive gender is usually masculine, except for a few cases in which the inclusive feminine form is used in general speech to represent both grammatical genders. Therefore, the equivalent terms rheumatologist (reumatólogo) and obstetric nurse (comadrona), should be interpreted in the standard, underlying sense of rheumatologist (reumatólogo or reumatóloga, depending on the context) and obstetric nurse (comadrona or comadrón, depending on the context), respectively.

2. In the case of example sentences (denoted by the symbol ◘), however, I have used the inclusive masculine form only (or, more rarely, the inclusive feminine form) when the example refers to a group of men and women or a person of indeterminate or unknown sex. In all other cases, I have tried to alternate examples in which an English noun has a standard, underlying Spanish masculine equivalent with others that have a feminine one, so that the reader is constantly aware that the transformation from English to Spanish involves an inherent grammatical gender decision. Therefore, with words such as child and doctor, the reader will encounter example sentences such as My child is badly injured (mi hijo está gravemente herido) and The doctor ordered complete rest (la médica le prescribió reposo absoluto) together with other examples such as She was often ill as a child (de pequeña se ponía enferma con frecuencia) and The doctor put the patient out for surgery (el médico anestesió a la paciente para la intervención quirúrgica).

      Notwithstanding the above, for some entries where I feel it would be useful for the reader to have access to more detailed comments, I have discussed specific problems encountered when translating English – a language with almost no traces of grammatical gender – to Spanish, where this feature is ever present. Take, for example, the first comment on usage (denoted by the symbol ►►) in the entry for Dr. or the comment on usage (denoted by the symbol ►) in meaning one, sub-meaning a), in the entry for nurse.

9 Preface to the first Brazilian edition by Dr Carla Vorsatz

When on the eve of the pandemic at the end of 2019 I received an invitation from Fernando Navarro to create a Brazilian edition of his famous Libro Rojo, I knew immediately it would be a herculean, though very necessary, task.

Herculean it would be, in terms of the quality, the size, and the nature of the task that I had been given. He did not want a translation of his dictionary, but rather a derivative work, a Brazilian edition of his dictionary.

Naturally, I was flattered, and I accepted the challenge.

After all, like Navarro, I have had double training as a translator, the owner of a small medical translation business since 1996, and as a doctor, with a specialisation in infectious and parasitic diseases, and ample experience in clinical research and emergency medicine, all of which made me sufficiently qualified.

The great closeness between the two Romance languages often made me feel ashamed of our colonisation by English. The Hispanic fidelity to our Romance roots, so very useful in medical vocabulary of Graeco-Latin origin, was what led me to choose the options that seemed most appropriate for my task, such as these: deoxyribonucleic acid is called ADN and ribonucleic acid is called ARN, instead of DNA and RNA, as are all their derivatives (messenger ARN = ARNm, etc.). The terms for viruses and the diseases they cause, including their abbreviations, are translated into Portuguese where they are already listed in the Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language (VOLP) or recorded in the main Brazilian dictionaries. The same applies to foreign words: when they are accepted by the standard, they are duly written here in italics, such as the very common abstract. All spellings follow the VOLP.

The guiding principle of translation is to offer information in a certain language from another language to monolingual readers and listeners. Therefore, it makes no sense at all to import words, false friends and syntactic and semantic structures from the original language and insert them in the target language. This is a pitfall many bilingual writers who are not translators fall into.

Navarro reveals to us each and every one of these traps in the universe of medical translation with clarity and concision, offering the best options for translation and explaining the erroneous alternatives already accepted by use. The idea is not to create new dogmas, but to accompany the natural movement of the language without allowing it to be destroyed, as is already happening to so many others. The tone is therefore that of a conversation among friends in a living room, speaking of a subject that interests us.

Indeed, it certainly does interest us!

This is the first medical translation dictionary in Portuguese.

There are of course many old medical dictionaries conceived by erudite doctors and intended for their fellow physicians – true lexicographic, etymological and vernacular delights. They are extremely valuable for the culture of medicine, but for the translator they are esoteric. Some small dictionaries, some of them bilingual, have already been published by translators, though not by a single author.

There are also contemporary medical dictionaries in other languages, and while they have an undeniable value for the medical translator and the medical student, having been translated by several translators, they are quite heterogeneous in terms of vocabulary and terminology.

Our dictionary is different because it was made by medical doctors and translators for medical doctors and translators. Furthermore, it is a dictionary of doubts and difficulties in medical translation, making it even more unusual. The Brazilian edition of the original English-to-Spanish version has been developed by a Brazilian doctor and medical translator who has always worked in Brazil.

In my view, this provides us with a differentiating factor when it comes to instrumental resources for medical and scientific writing in English and Portuguese, allowing for greater excellence in our areas of knowledge in both languages.

It was not by chance that the launch of the Dicionário de dúvidas e dificuldades da tradução médica do inglês para o português was entrusted to the Brazilian Association of Translators and Interpreters (ABRATES) with the support of the National Union of Translators (SINTRA), to whom I extend my deepest thanks by way of their presidents, Giovanna Lester and Ana Beatriz Caldeira Ferreira Braga Dinucci, respectively.

It would not be possible to finish this prologue without mentioning the most revolutionary aspect of this dictionary: it is alive. Yes, it is alive and pulsating, evolving and interactive. Being exclusively digital, all entries have at the foot of the page a contact form to communicate doubts, suggestions, comments, proposals for terms, data on regionalisms and other speaking styles from variants of Portuguese, critiques, corrections, and more. I respond to all messages with the decision either taken (e.g., a small punctuation error already corrected on the screen) or soon to be taken (e.g., whether to include in a future edition and when). The names of all the people who collaborate in this way are permanently listed in the acknowledgements of each edition.

Finally, please be sure to read the foreword in the Spanish editions. In it, Navarro explains in detail how to use the dictionary, what each symbol means, its history, different lexicographical options, and all other essential information to ensure that the dictionary may be used easily and skilfully.

I hope you enjoy it!

Dedication

To Dominique Perrot, for all and everything.

10 Acknowledgements

First and foremost, to the beloved daughters life gave me, together with their partners, Anaik and Tato, and Laís and Jaime, and to my grandson Oliver; to the loved ones fate brought me later, my daughter Ana Paula Keila and my granddaughter, her daughter Mila; and to my grandson Tomás: I share my life with them all, and they keep my heart forever warm.

To my very dear teacher and friend, Dr Jacqueline Anita de Menezes, who introduced me to medical translation, taught me and accompanied me along its paths, and with whom I learned and continue to learn the ins and outs of the craft.

To all my patients, who taught me the practice of medicine and gave me their trust and the privilege of caring for their health, and who opened the doors of their private lives to me, which has always made me feel honoured as a professional and as a human being.

And, last, but not least, to Fernando Navarro, for the enormous gift of bringing the Libro Rojo to my language, my country and my life, with his infinite kindness and warmth; to José Antonio de la Riva Fort, for his invaluable and ever-warm assistance, his unconditional support, his unfailing goodwill and his bright smile, whose company on this journey made it both possible and thoroughly enjoyable; and to Constanza Cervino, whose gentleness, professional skill, rapport, determination, commitment to the Brazilian edition and tireless dedication made all the difference.

Acknowledgements for version 1.02

On 9 April, Medscape Português began weekly publication of previously unpublished texts from the Dictionary of Doubts and Difficulties in English–Portuguese Medical Translation or DDD, even before its launch on 14 May 2022. My sincerest thanks for their support and encouragement.

I would also like to place on record my gratitude for the support provided by Abrates (Brazilian Association of Translators and Interpreters), Sintra (National Union of Translators and Interpreters) and HighFive, the company responsible for the brilliant simultaneous interpreting at the event, with the support of Tradusa - Meetings - Courses - Workshops, for hosting the launch of the Dictionary of Doubts and Difficulties in English–Portuguese Medical Translation on 14 May 2022. In addition, Abrates made a recording of the launch available on its YouTube channel for 30 days, a further reason for gratitude. My thanks go to Giovanna Lester, Eleonora Nascimento de Alcântara Barros, Bruno Murtinho and Reinaldo Rocha, and to Cátia Santana, respectively, as well as to Damiana Rosa, and to the interpreters coordinated by Norma Medina: the Spanish and Portuguese interpreters Meg Batalha and Enrique Julio Romera, and the sign language interpreters Karoline Andrade, Suzana Souza and Marlon Soares.

I would also like to thank the director of Cosnautas, Dr José Antonio de la Riva Fort, and Constanza Cervino for being part of the launch panel and presenting the different aspects involved in the difficult task of transforming the unique Libro Rojo into a Brazilian edition that meets the needs of the Portuguese-speaking public.

And, of course, to Dr Fernando A. Navarro, author of the original Libro Rojo, of which the Brazilian edition is a derivative work, my most sincere acknowledgement and deep gratitude for entrusting me with the task of making the inestimable value of his work accessible to Brazil and to Portuguese speakers throughout the world.

Contributors to version 1.12

Debora Blanco

Contributors to version 1.11

Mirtes Pinheiro

Contributors to version 1.06

Ana Elisa Igel, Ana Maciel, Ana Maria Barreiros, Anthonio João, Carolina Ribeiro, Cátia Santana, Claudia Corbusier, Claudia Dornelles, Christiane Karydakis, Daniel Fernandes, Dawn Taylor, Ester Dodo, Estevam Sampaio Rebouças, Giovana Lester, Jacqueline Anita de Menezes, Joana Bernardes dos Santos, Joaquim Bezerra, Júlio César Leites Rodriguez, Karine Souto, Kathleen Goldsmith Killing, Kelly Elizeu, Lavinia Gondim, Leonardo Faria , Luiz Sérgio de Oliveira, Marcos Henrique Martins, Maria Aparecida Amim de Carvalho, Maria Dolores Wanderley, Maria Helena Almeida Pereira, Miriã Carper, Mateus Baldi, Mirtes Pinheiro, Monica Carneiro, Norma Medina, Patrícia Gimenez Camargo, Rached Cavalcanti, Rhuan Contardi, Sofia Pulici, Sonia M Joventino, Talita Domiciano, Talitha Bittencourt Austin, Thaiane Assumpcao, Vera Lucia de Godoy Bueno Larsson, Vinicius Carvalho, Virginia Lovisolo

Contributors to version 1.05

Alan Dalles, Beatriz Araujo do Rosário, Debora Branco, Jacqueline Anita de Menezes, Laura Bocco, Marcia Gouveia, Marisol Mandarino, Nilo Sérgio Loja da Silva, Paulo César Hoffman Dorna, Ricardo Bertoni, Talita Domiciano

Contributors to version 1.04

Bruno de Carvalho, Carlos Garrido Rodrigues, Laís Volp, Marcelo de Oliveira Lima

Contributors to version 1.03

Ana Paula Keila Vicente Vieira, José Ernando Souza Filho, Kenny Hernandez, Laura Bocco, Marcelo Lima

Contributors to version 1.02

Gisele Klein, Elionai Paes, Cátia Santana, Bernardo Schubsky, Leoleli Schwartz, Ana Paula Keila Vicente Vieira and Laís Volp

Contributors to version 1.01

Americo Grilo, Ana Paula Keila Vicente Vieira, Chadwick Wenga, Claudia Yanomine, Constanza Cervino, Cristina de Amorim Machado, Fabio Santana, Juan Manuel Igea, Kenny Hernandez, Laís Volp, Luiz Carlos Fraga, Marisol Mandarino

11 Bibliography