Metaphrase

Abstract: Clinical terminology servers are distinguished from more broadly based terminology servers intended for nomenclature development or mediation across classifications. Focusing upon the consistent and comparable entry of clinical observations, findings, and events, key desiderata are enumerated and expanded. These include 1) word normalization, 2) word completion, 3) target terminology specification, 4) spelling correction, 5) lexical matching, 6) term completion, 7) semantic locality, 8) term composition and 9) decomposition. Comparisons of this functionality to previously published models and specifications are made. Experience with a clinical terminology server, Metaphrase, is described.

Abstract: In the mid 1680s, Aphra Behn started translating from French into English at speed. She had been to France early in 1683 on a trip which, although undocumented, appears to have allowed her to perfect her knowledge of French. In the seventeenth century, the translation of the classics was recognized as a prestigious activity, but this was not the case with the translation of contemporary authors. Almost all theoretical texts about translation were specifically concerned with Latin and Greek, as for instance Cowley's short preface to his Pindarique Odes (1656), where he gave a particularly felicitous expression to the seventeenth-century paradigm contrasting literal, or 'servile', translation, and free (or 'libertine' as he has it) translation. In his influential preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), Dryden replaced this dichotomy with a ternary model, famously setting forth the three ways open to a translator as 'metaphrase' or word-for-word translation, 'paraphrase', or translation 'with a latitude', and finally 'imitation', in which the translator 'assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion'. It is most likely Behn was familiar with this text, as she herself, while claiming she could not read Latin, contributed an Ovidian translation to the collective volume. However, as Elizabeth Spearing writes, 'consideration of late seventeenth-century theories of translation in relation to the works of Aphra Behn is of limited usefulness', as she dealt with mostly unchartered territory by translating very contemporary authors from the vernacular. This allowed her to make the original texts her own in a variety of ways, and, as will be apparent, she utilizes the whole range of strategies Dryden had outlined - which calls into question his neat categories and forces us to revise the status of translation in the seventeenth century.

Abstract: Patient descriptors, or "problems," such as "brain metastases of melanoma" are an effective way for caregivers to describe patients. But most problems, e.g., "cubital tunnel syndrome" or "ulnar nerve compression," found in problem lists in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) are not comparable computationally--in general, a computer cannot determine whether they describe the same or a related problem, or whether the user would have preferred "ulnar nerve compression syndrome." Metaphrase is a scalable, middleware component designed to be accessed from problem-manager applications in EMR systems. In response to caregivers' informal descriptors it suggests potentially equivalent, authoritative, and more formally comparable descriptors. Metaphrase contains a clinical subset of the 1997 UMLS Metathesaurus and some 10,000 "problems" from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Beth Israel Hospital. Word and term completion, spelling correction, and semantic navigation, all combine to ease the burden of problem conceptualization, entry and formalization.

Abstract: Translation is, etymologically, a "carrying across" or "bringing across": the Latin translatio derives from transferre (trans, "across" + ferre, "to carry" or "to bring"). The modern European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model: the English "translation," the Spanish translacion and traduccion, the French traduction, the Italian traduzione, the Portuguese and Rumanian terms (de rived from the kindred Latin traducere, "to lead across" or "bring across"), the German Ubersetzung (a "putting across") and its Swedish, Danish and Norwegian cognates, the Russian pyehryehvod (a "leading across" or "putting across") and its Serbo-Croatian cognate, and the mod ern Polish przeklad (a "putting across") and its Czech cognate?all these are variations on the same Latin theme. The other Polish term tlumacz, tlumaczenie comes from the Turkish tilmuz via the German Dolmetsch. And the Greek term for translation, metaphrasis (a "speaking across"), has supplied English with "metaphrase," meaning a literal, or word-for-word, translation, as contrasted with "paraphrase" (a "saying in other words"). The latter Greek terminological distinction was adopted by John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting in the target language "counter parts," or equivalents, for the expressions that have been used in the source language: