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Introduction
I am a Professor in medical English at Sorbonne University School of Medicine and Health. My research interests are the linguistic and didactic aspects of medical languages. My research focusses on the language of medicine as well as on the naming of diseases in a comparative lexicological perspective. I also take a special interest in the naming of branded drugs from a multimodal point of view. I am the editor of Les langues de la médecine : analyse comparative interlingue (Peter Lang, 2021).
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Publications
Publications (36)
Since the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, insomnia has become a major public health issue. Attracted by the financial potential, the pharmaceutical industry quickly turned its attention to this emerging market. However, in a competitive market, pharmaceutical manufacturers had to create distinct product identities. One determining facto...
A harmonized medical nomenclature that is accessible to the lay people is crucial to raising awareness of insidious health problems such as chronic kidney disease and facilitating communication between healthcare professionals. This article presents the proposals of a French-speaking working group for the translation and adaptation into French of t...
En 2017, le marché mondial du médicament a dépassé le seuil des 1 000 milliards de dollars US de chiffre d’affaires, en croissance de 6 % par rapport à 2016. Pourtant, selon P. Even & B. Debré [2012], l’industrie pharmaceutique n’aurait pas fait de découverte majeure depuis des décennies. On comprend alors qu’elle doive recourir à d’autres stratégi...
French hospital medical slang: Myth or reality? If, in everyday French, many words considered to be offensive (nain "dwarf", gros "fat", or mongolien "Mongolian") have been replaced by cir-cumlocutions (personne de petite taille "person of short stature" et personne en surpoids "overweight person") or by scientific terms (trisomique "triso-mic"), F...
Stent, bypass, screening… Since the end of World War II, English has reigned supreme over the language of medicine. But this has not always been the case. For example, many words relating to infectious diseases come from German. French, for its part, has also strongly influenced the vocabulary of obstetrics and cardiology.
What is the state of heal...
This paper is a lexicological analysis of words imported from French into the modern English language of medicine. We replace the different contributions of the French language in their historical perspective. We endeavour to give a description of the origin of the words that entered the English language during two periods of time: that following t...
Due to the considerable volume of medical content knowledge that medical students have to acquire and memorise, very little time can be devoted to medical English learning. Therefore, an English language teacher has to find strategies to both motivate the learners and facilitate language acquisition inside and outside the classroom. Yet, very few t...
This paper is a lexicological study of the brand names of newly FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approved drugs which aims at highlighting the new trends observed in drug naming. For our corpus, we used a listing of 320 drugs approved by the FDA for sale in the United States for the years 2012 to 2017. In our study, we showed that the commonly us...
Pour la première fois, à la suite de pressions diplomatiques, en mai 2015, l’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS) a publié des recommandations concernant la dénomination des nouvelles maladies infectieuses humaines. Dans cette note après avoir parcouru les principales matrices lexicogéniques utilisées dans la dénomination des maladies (éponymisa...
The purpose of this lexicological study is to present a typology of patients’ euphemizing lay denominations of medical terms illustrated by examples in English and French. Various textbooks and lexicons dealing with English and French for medical purposes served as corpora. The euphemisms were classified according to the three semantic processes by...
There has always been a discrepancy between the language used by the physician (borrowed from Greek and Latin) and that used by the patient (derived from the vernacular language), and numerous studies have demonstrated that language barriers have a negative impact on both the quality and the cost of healthcare (Ogden et al. 2001, 2003; Tailor et Og...
In this article, we intend to analyse how grammar lies within the scope of the action-oriented approach through a critical appraisal of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. This analysis highlights the fact that the questions relating to the implementation of grammar remain unanswered and that advocating eclecticism as far as e...
In times past, drugs often derived from plants and were quite naturally named after them. Nowadays, considering the significant economic issues at stake (Dutchen 2009), pharmaceutical companies increasingly entrust brand agencies with the naming of their products (Kenagy 2001). In this article, we offer to analyze the names of some brand and generi...
La formation universitaire des enseignants qui sont conduits à enseigner une langue de spécialité en France reste très généraliste. Or, une langue de spécialité ne saurait, au vu de sa complexité, être appréhendée sans une véritable formation préalable. Dans cette contribution, nous proposons tout d’abord de rappeler que la langue de la médecine, c...
In this article, we intend to analy se how grammar lies within the scope of the actionoriented approach through a critical appraisal of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. This analy sis highlights the fact that the questions relating to the implementation of grammar remain unanswered and that advocating eclecticism as far as...
In French univ ersities, education for Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) teachers remains highly general. Yet, due to its complexity, a specialised language cannot be mastered without prior proper training. This paper first points ou t that the language of medicine, like other specialised languages, is multidimensional and multireferential. In...
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that, even behind some of the professional medical discourses in which the national language is kept because languages are culturally connoted, there are linguistic and discursive characteristics that pertain to the medical language, and which show that it is, as the science it conveys, universal. Besides,...
Quelles sont les connaissances medicales requises pour enseigner l’anglais en medecine ? Comment construire un cours d’anglais medical ? Comment exploiter la video et organiser des jeux de role ? Il n’est pas rare que les enseignants d’anglais soient « catapultes » dans les CHU sans aucune formation prealable et se retrouvent face a des difficultes...
L'apprentissage d'une langue 2 ne peut se passer de l'apprentissage de la grammaire. La question n'est donc pas de savoir s'il faut, ou non, enseigner la grammaire mais de tenter de trouver une approche qui rende cette matière, réputée ardue, à la fois plaisante et claire. Le recours à une pédagogie de l'humour pourrait être une des solutions possi...
Metalanguage and metaphors in the grammar of English for specific purposes.
Because learners need stepping-stones before being able to construct new knowledge, resorting to metaphors, analogies and cartoons should, by building up a sense of meaningfulness, facilitate the internalisation of abstract concepts. My research is motivated by the desire t...
