Variations in persuasive tone: a comparison of multilingual health information websites
Health information websites frequently contain texts intended to persuade the reader to take action. When such texts are translated, it is important to consider how the writer’s attitude as perceived by the reader influences the latter, and how the persuasive characteristics of the texts have been preserved or culturally adapted in translation.
As part of her PhD studies completed just a year earlier, Amy Dara Hochberg analysed a corpus of 73 multilingual health information websites, focusing on HIV and tuberculosis diagnostic testing. The corpus was divided into six sub-corpora, covering non-translated (L1) and translated (L2) texts in English, Spanish and Catalan.
Her methodology began with extracting and classifying the words used, followed by analysing the technicality of the vocabulary and subsequently the writer-reader relationship, and concluded with identifying the difference between the languages by means of statistics and discourse analysis.
By Amy Dara’s own admission, the “erudite, dry academic parts” came more towards the end, so as a practitioner, I found the first part of the presentation on the writer-reader relationship most interesting.
In the L1 texts, the English was found to be more casual and individualistic, addressing the reader directly. It was also marked by gender-neutral words, such as partner. The Spanish and Catalan texts were more formal, authoritative and collectivist (no surprises there), referring to the effects on a reader’s friends and family, with the Catalan text coming across as more deontic and featuring gender-inclusive language, e.g. al metge o la metgessa (to the doctor, m/f).
When it came to the L2 texts, Amy Dara’s findings revealed a lack of cultural adaptation in all three translated sub-corpora, with the source L1 language characteristics carried over to the L2 texts. Moving on to vocabulary, Amy Dara identified that the terminology was more technical than recommended (Spanish L1 the most, Catalan L1 the least); astonishingly, the English and Catalan L2 texts saw increased technicality due to the Spanish L1 source texts.
At this point, Amy Dara invited a bewildered audience to “flatten your shoulder blades against the back of the chair, lift your rib cage up away from your seat, and relax your shoulders”. She proceeded to ask: which lay terms did she use? (The answer was shoulder blades and rib cage). But if she had used the more technical terms and was speaking to a less learned audience than us, would they know what she was referring to? This illustrated why the English L1 texts tended to opt for lay terms instead of specialised terminology, while the Spanish and Catalan L1 texts employed descriptions to avoid technical terms. Amy Dara advocated for an approach that involved using the specialised term but followed by a description, so as to empower the reader by improving their health literacy ‒ an opportunity for the translator as much as the writer.
Summing up her recommendations for writers and translators, Amy implored us to adapt texts to readers’ comprehension levels, to use appropriate lexical familiarisation approaches according to what is most prevalent in non-translated target-language health communication to render texts accessible, and to consider cultural differences in multimodal techniques.
This METM24 presentation was chronicled by Lloyd Bingham.
Featured photo courtesy of MET.