Translation of the health brochure and impact on the target reader: A contrastive analysis of the structural and pragmatic features of texts translated into Spanish versus texts written originally in Spanish

Abstract

This study involved the analysis of a corpus of health brochures in Spanish, contrasting the way this particular genre is formed and understood in the United States and Mexico. The corpus is made up of two subcorpora: a collection of health brochures published in the United States (translated from English into Spanish), and a collection of brochures from Mexico (written originally in Spanish). These subcorpora were analyzed and compared from many different angles, providing a comprehensive view of how the texts are structured and organized. Analysis at the microlinguistic level, grounded in Speech Act Theory, shows differences in the linguistic realization of the persuasive interactional goals in the two text types. At the macrolinguistic level, a factor analysis reveals differences between the two text types in terms of the patterning and co-occurrence of linguistic features serving the overall informational and persuasive functions characteristic of the health brochure. These differences are attributed to the interpersonal relations and cultural and social contexts in which the two text types are embedded. A subset of texts from both subcorpora was field tested with the aim of assessing the impact of the two text types on readers, in addition to readers' perceptions of the texts. Fifty-four Spanish-speaking adults from Mexico participated in this part of the study. Field testing involved a three pronged approach: a pretest-posttest protocol, recall protocol, and interviews. Responses provide a look at the brochures from the perspective of the reader, and shed light on the role of the two text types in the Mexican community. Results of both parts of this study contribute to the fields of translation studies, translator training, contrastive rhetoric, corpus linguistics, genre analysis, cross-cultural communication, and health education and communication.