On "intralinguistic translation" from summaries of product characteristics to patient information leaflets

This paper addresses features of UK Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) as originating and shifting from the corresponding Summaries of Product Characteristics (SmPCs). PILs accompany prescription-only and over-the-counter medicines to ensure that all citizens have equal access to reliable and effective quality information. To this purpose, they have been regularly revised by pharmaceutical companies and then validated by the national departments of Health in compliance with national regulations and EU directives and regulations. Alternatively, they are now licensed for use in EU Member States by the European Medicines Agency. The discursive construction of risk (Fage-Butler 2011) and trust generation (Earle 2010) informs patient-centeredness (Balint 1969; Mead, Bower 2000): intralinguistic and intergeneric expert-to-layman translation (Zehtsen 2007) are at work to turn highly specialized Summaries of Product Characteristics (SmPCs) into functionally adequate Patient Information Leaflets (PILs), their closer cognates. These can be seen as seats for Knowledge Dissemination (Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004), reconceptualization and recontextualization. In his context, it is the purpose of this paper to address questions about the shift from presentation of biomedical research to interactive and patient-friendly communication that pursues engagement with the reader via recourse to general words (as against specialist terms or hypernyms), basic categories (vs. hyponyms) and, importantly, 1st and 2nd person conditionals and 2nd person imperatives and question-answer patterns (as against nominalizations).