Clinical urgency in translation: risk, priority, and shifts in meaning in Turkish–English emergency-care texts

Aims: The aim of the study is to examine the extent to which indicators of clinical urgency, risk and priority in Turkish emergency healthcare texts are preserved in their official English versions. Methods: The study analysed paired Turkish and official English emergency healthcare information texts published on the websites of nine public hospitals affiliated with the Ministry of Health. A total of 86 comparable Turkish-English semantic units indicating clinical risk, response time, triage and priority were identified manually from the paired texts. From a medical translation perspective, the analysis drew on functionalist approaches to translation and the concepts of communicative function and functional adequacy, applying three analytical dimensions: risk and certainty, temporal urgency, and action and priority. Source-target relations were coded as urgency maintained (UM), urgency amplified (UA), urgency downgraded (UD), urgency reframed (UR), or urgency ambiguous (UAmb). Results: It was found in the study that clinical urgency was maintained in 74 of the 86 units examined (86.0%). Urgency was amplified in two units (2.3%), downgraded in three units (3.5%), reframed in four units (4.7%), and rendered ambiguous in three units (3.5%). The shifts concerned risk and certainty, temporal urgency, and action and priority, resulting in differences in functional correspondence between source and target units. Conclusion: The findings indicate that clinical urgency is generally preserved in English emergency health communications; however, some translation changes may be significant in terms of conveying risk and the necessity for intervention. It is concluded that functional adequacy in the translation of emergency health texts depends on preserving the source text’s risk, urgency and priority functions in the target text.