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MEDICAL ACRONYMS AND HOMOACRONYMS: CLASSIFICATION, USAGE AND TRANSLATION ISSUES // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2017. Issue 3 (180). P. 28-32

The tendency to linguistic economy resulted in the enormous amount of abbreviations. Their number is increasingly growing in medical science. Being short and capacious these lexical units are hard to be perceived and translated. Professional translation is early sought in all fields. But it’s the most urgent in medicine for it must be based on the accuracy of information, accuracy and competence of professional operations as well as the feeling of high responsibility of each professional in a definite field of practical science.Thus a demand for the study, regulation and adequate translation of abbreviated terms has aroused. It contributes to the professional medical communication. This article is devoted to the study of acronyms and homoacronyms used in current medical literature. The study is done in the line of nominative and cognitive investigation. The method of continuous sampling of medical acronyms and homoacronyms from medical scientific articles and dictionaries as well as the method of structural, typological and semantic analysis. As a result of English periodical medical publications and specialized dictionaries review the authors have identified several categories of acronyms and homoacronyms. The article presents an original classification of these lexical units and reviews the means of their translation. Performed typological analysis allows to single out eleven categories of medical acronyms and homoacronyms. The largest groups consist of the abbreviations which include names of anatomical structures, symptoms and syndromes.

Keywords: abbreviation, acronym, homoacronym, medical terminology, medical discourse