ABSTRACT

During crises, intralingual translation (or simplification) of medical content can facilitate comprehension among lay readers and foster their compliance with instructions aimed to avoid or mitigate the cascading effects of crises. The onus of simplifying health-related texts often falls on medical experts, and the task of intralingual translation tends to be non-automated. Medical authors are asked to check and remember different sets of plain language guidelines, while also relying on their interpretation of how and when to implement these guidelines. Accordingly, even simplified health-related texts present characteristics that make them difficult to read and comprehend, particularly for an audience with low (health) literacy. Against this background, this chapter describes an experimental study aimed at testing the impact that using a controlled language (CL) checker to semi-automate intralingual translation has on the readability and comprehensibility of medical content. The study focused on the plain language summaries and abstracts produced by the non-profit organization Cochrane. Using Coh-Metrix and recall, this investigation found that the introduction of a CL checker influenced some readability features, but not lay readers’ comprehension, regardless of their native language. Finally, strategies to enhance the comprehensibility of health content and reduce the vulnerability of readers in crises are discussed.