Towards teaching english for pharmaceutical purposes: An attempt at a description of key vocabulary and phraseology in clinical trial protocols and european public assessment reports

Abstract

With the exception of medical schools or medical universities, English for Pharmaceutical Purposes is rarely taught as a specialist language course or ESP module at the university-level (e.g. designed specifically for training translators of specialist texts). This may be caused by, among other factors, the lack of comprehensive description of vocabulary and phraseology used across different pharmaceutical text types and genres, e.g. patient-pharmacist interactions, patient information leaflets, clinical trial protocols etc. This preliminary study is designed as an initial step to develop a description of vocabulary and phraseology, namely keywords, n-grams consisting of 4 words and phrase frames based on n-grams consisting of 4 words all used in clinical trial protocols and European public assessment reports written originally in English. The analyses are aimed to provide an initial description of the use of distinctive lexis and phraseology found in the said text varieties. The results offer new, yet still preliminary, data for further descriptions of English used for pharmaceutical purposes to be conducted in the future.