From breathing difficulty to dyspnea: The translation process from the patient's story to the doctor's report in interactive medical case reports.

The aim of this paper is to study the 'translation process' (Fleischman 2001) from the patient's story into the doctor's report in interactive case reports from professional medical journals. Interactive case reports are a relatively new development in the genre, which has been postulated by, and adopted in, several publication outlets. The novelty of the variety is the possibility for readers to comment on a published case as well as the optional Patient's perspective section, in which the patient can share their experience of illness and treatment. In the present paper, a collection of interactive case reports derived from professional medical journals will be examined. The material under study can be seen as a contact situation between the lay discourse of a patient's narration and the professional discourse of medical description. The comparison and qualitative analysis of the two discourses referring to the same disease event will point to different communicative accents, different means and different effects. Drawing on the tradition of Rhetorical Genre Studies, the paper will also emphasise the many social practices in which the variety is, and can be, used.