Articulating medical terminology in Luganda

Abstract

This research report addresses an institutional medical language communication barrier issue that exists in diverse medical hospitals in Uganda. This project assesses the situation by eliciting the real picture from the experience of a sample of medical practitioners and searching for suitable learning support tools and assisting techniques. Currently, a lot of patients that visit hospitals do not understand the proper language used in hospitals, this is so because the doctors these days have medical terminologies they use that are not commonly used outside hospitals. Therefore some of these patients might be uneducated and fail to understand even the simplest terms that are commonly taught in schools. The purpose of this research will aim at proposing that the best approach to overcome the above problems will be the translation of medical terms and local languages such that patients fully understand what the doctors want. Precision (P), economy (E), generativity (G), internationality (I), transparency (T), (antiobscenity) (O), systemicity (S), consistency (C) and language - relative acceptability (A) of terms can be acronymically captured as PEGITOSCA. Let it be contended with due circumspect that any theory of scientific terminology and any method or set of methods of terminological elaboration that may ensue from the theory mainly hinge upon The fulfillment of the overall PEGITOSCA criterion for scientific terminology. I formulated the criterion for the first time in Kiingi (1989) when I was working on the Terminological modernization of Luganda.