COVID-related terms in translated popular scientific articles

A case study on term variation

Abstract

This article presents a case study of COVID-related terms in popular science articles. It is a corpus-based analysis of articles published in Scientific American and translated into Polish. Its aim is to observe COVID-related terminology variation in translated popular science texts. The bilingual corpus used in this study comprises 51 pairs of texts published in 2020, 2021, and 2022 in Scientific American and translated into Polish and then published in Świat Nauki. The design for this study included corpus creation and compilation, automated term extraction, exploration of the corpus for relevant contexts, equivalent terms and variants (concordance, parallel concordance). The findings confirm variation in medical terminology in popularizations, possibly motivated by language structure and the need for clarity in popular science communication. The study revealed denominative, conceptual and linguistic variants. The most prominent variation concerned the term COVID.