Terminological aspect of oral medical communication in German and Russian in the “specialist – non-specialist” mode

Archive of Scientific Articles

ISSUE:

Philology. Theory & Practice. 2025. Volume 18. Issue 11

COLLECTION:

Comparative and Contrastive Research

All issues

Abstract. The research aims to identify the peculiarities of term functioning in the speech of German and Russian doctors when conversing with an audience that lacks specialized medical training. Using methods of comparative linguistics, contextual analysis, and analysis of dictionary definitions, as well as quantitative counting, the author examines the similarities and differences in the functioning of terms in the speeches of Russian and German doctors, identifies the specificities of their use, and explains the reasons for the found differences. As a result of the research, it was established that in oral medical communication, there is an adaptation of the scientific worldview of specialists to the naive worldview of listeners without specialized medical education. This process is driven by two types of factors: objective and subjective. Objective reasons for balancing the two worldviews include natural language processes (assimilation of borrowed terms in recipient languages, expansion of highly specialized lexemes beyond a single scientific field, cultural components). Subjective reasons include the deliberate simplification of professional medics’ own speech through the application of special linguistic techniques when operating with terms (explanation, replacement of loanwords with native terminological lexemes, use of common vocabulary instead of terminology, and others). The scientific novelty is related to the examination of oral medical communication, which has become possible thanks to the development of information technologies and the availability of recordings of unprepared dialogues between doctors and non-specialists (in our case, these are radio talk podcasts). The work is the first to consider the terminological aspect of oral medical communication between doctors and non-specialists in the German and Russian language pair, defining the specifics of terminological lexeme functioning in the oral speech of medics, and establishing the mechanisms of adaptation of the specialist’s scientific worldview to the ordinary perception of a non-specialist in two linguocultures.