Medical brochure as a textual genre

Abstract

This book studies the text genre of medical brochures in the United Kingdom and Spain for two main reasons: firstly, to determine the features that these texts present in each country, and, secondly, to check if medical brochures published in Spain and translated from Spanish into English include all relevant features typical of original English texts.

It begins by defining the terms ‘genre’, ‘class’ and ‘type’ and relating them to ‘medical brochures’. After referring to ‘text type’, a related term is explained: ‘text typology’. This leads to the discussion of several specialised typologies and the presentation of a new proposal of typology, in which the position of the genre of medical brochures is determined.

In order to perform a contrastive study of medical brochures in English and in Spanish, the book defines what constitutes a ‘linguistic corpus’, comments on different types of corpora, and presents its own version of classification in which the corpus used for the study is located. Finally, the results obtained from the contrastive analysis are presented and analysed: the features observed in the original brochures (English and Spanish) are shown, and the results are contrasted with those found in the translated brochures.