Lingua comune e lingua speciale nelle consultazioni mediche mediate. Un’analisi lessico-terminologica

In this paper I will discuss some properties of the linguistic variety, or better, of the linguistic varie-ties which the (social) interpreter should expect to encounter and use in their professional practice in medical consultations, particularly in the phases of complaints and verbal and practical examina-tion. The question will be studied here only in its lexical and terminological aspects: further re-search is needed for a more complete analysis which accounts for morphological, syntactic, seman-tic and textual levels of description. This study is based on a corpus of authentic data, consisting of about 50 interactions between physi-cians, interpreters, foreign patients, recorded in two public Hospitals of North Italy, and then tran-scribed.