Analyzing the translations of Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) in terms of standardized PIL sections

The content of patient information leaflets (PILs) provides key health-related issues for consumers.Mistranslations of this essential information can, therefore, have significant health-care consequences. Thepresent study, thus, attempted to evaluate the translations of medical patient information leaflets into Persianlanguage to find out to what extent Persian translated leaflets of medications correspond to the source Englishtexts in terms of standardized sections of PILs. To this aim, a corpus comprised of 30 English leaflets along with their Persian translations were purposively selected and analyzed in terms of the 8 standardized PIL sectionsdefined by Food and Drug Administration: introductory information (naming/category, composition,formulation, mechanism of action), indications, contraindications and risks, side-effects, storage, administrationand dosage, precautions, and ending. A qualitative content analysis of the source texts and target texts revealed many instances of ellipsis made by the translators in the formulation (100%), mechanism of action (71%),composition (70%), precautions (30%) and ending (20%) sections of the leaflets. Besides the omissions, a 26% of addition to content was found in the Persian translations of the drug storage information section

Keywords:

translation , patient information leaflet , PIL , PIL section