ABSTRACT
The term ‘technical’ is not confined to natural science and technology – though it is fairly frequently used as a shorthand term for ‘natural scientific and technological’. Any specialist field has its own technical terms and its own genre-marking characteristics: a look at a hobbies magazine, a review of the rock scene or the city pages and the sports section of the paper is enough to confirm this. Texts in these and any other specialized fields are properly speaking ‘technical’ texts. In this and the following chapters, we will examine four major types of technical texts: medical texts (this chapter), botanical texts (Chapter 17), constitutional texts (Chapter 18) and Islamic finance texts (Chapter 19).
