Understanding and enhancing comprehensibility in texts for patients in an institutional health care context in Spain: a mixed methods analysis

• Isabel García-Izquierdo ^[1] ; Vicent Montalt ^[2]
  1. [1] Universitat Jaume I

     Universitat Jaume I

     Castellón, España

     
  2. [2] Gentt group
• Localización: Revista española de lingüística aplicada, ISSN 0213-2028, Vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, págs. 592-610
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1075/resla.00008.gar
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • This paper aims to analyse text comprehensibility in a corpus of Fact Sheets for Patients (FSPs) in Spanish as used in a real clinical and institutional setting in Spain; and to provide data and criteria that can help writers and translators to enhance text comprehensibility when dealing with FSPs. Regarding the methodology, we analysed a corpus of FSPs in Spanish in three subsequent stages: (1) readability formulae, (2) expert analysis, and (3) questionnaires and focus-groups addressing the real target readership of patients. Experts produced improved versions of two of the texts that were then compared and judged by the patients. According to the Inflesz/Word correlation we used in our analysis most texts of the corpus fall within normal difficulty values. However, the communication experts made critical comments about some of them regarding both readability and legibility and patients expressed the need for improvement of some aspects of the texts. This fact leads us to conclude that there is considerable room for improvement in FSPs in Spanish. Highly-sensitive patients and situations require the participation of real patients as readers in order to achieve the optimum degree of quality of originals and translations. Therefore, patients’ perceptions can be crucial to medical writers and translators when writing FSPs in a more comprehensible and empathetic way

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