Proper name-based terms in multilingual medical communication

Abstract

Proper name-based terms – such as Alzheimer’s disease or the Achilles tendon – are integral to medical discourse. However, their formal and semantic variability, synonymy, and cultural significance can lead to misunderstandings in mono- and multilingual oral and written medical communication, as well as in medical translation. Situated at the intersection of onomastics and terminology, this study takes a functional linguistic approach, adopting interprofessional collaboration between applied linguistics and medicine to examine the occurrence of proper name-based terms, the challenges of
identifying them, and the ways to disambiguate them. The authors outline the advantages and limitations of using such terms, highlighting the roles of banalization and stigmatization, as well as the role of historical and societal context. Through an interprofessional synthesis of the relevant literature and examples drawn from medical language use, the paper systematizes these phenomena and demonstrates the interpretability issues that proper name-based terms can raise in multilingual medical
communication. The findings aim to promote greater accuracy, safety, and cultural sensitivity in medical communication within an increasingly globalized professional environment.