he problems of writing a new dictionary of medical terms are endless: not only do we have to find terms that are not in the specialised dictionaries of medical translation, which are generally masterpieces, but also those whose proposed translation does not work today, or rather, whose translation does not correspond to the fast-paced times in which we live.

The work has been twofold: on the one hand, research to find the translation that works best in the 21st century; and, on the other, to study the proposals of the reference works in order to a) accept them, if necessary, or b) modify them, if necessary.

Moreover, the strict orthotypography, which is still one of the distinguishing marks of these other masterpieces, can be absurd and even useless for the needs of the translator or medical interpreter of 2025, which is why, in my new dictionary, it has been simplified as much as possible.

Prescriptivism has presided over the medical dictionaries of the past, most of which were intended to be normative. We needed one that was drescriptivist and that met the real linguistic needs of medical translators and interpreters in the 21st century.

To achieve all this, I designed a revolutionary lexicographic template that reduces the length of the query to a few seconds, but gives the opportunity to learn more about the term and even to see it (if it is visible) or to read the main serious scientific article about it.

Finally, I should point out that most of the examples come from real translations and that, when this is not the case, I resorted to AI to get the best possible ones.

Speaker: Pablo Mugüerza (Spain)

Pablo Mugüerza is a Spanish medical translator EN>ES with more than 40 years of experience as a translator, both on-site (McGraw-Hill) and freelance (most of the time). He graduated in medicine in 1987 and since then has worked for the most important translation agencies in Spain and abroad, and for most of the major pharmaceutical companies and CROs. He is an external translator for the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland and an editor for the OPS. He is one of the foremost authorities on the translation of EN>ES clinical trial protocols, on which he has published a highly demanded manual (the 2nd edition sold out in March 2018). Since 2009 he has presented more than a hundred workshops, courses and conferences in both English and Spanish, in person and online, in many countries in Europe and in North and South America. Currently, in addition to his uninterrupted work as a translator and ENES reviewer for the world’s leading agencies and CROs, he is a consultant for the terminology unit of the Spanish Royal National Academy of Medicine and for Evidera (one of the world’s largest Health Marketing Research companies), a “trust miner” for the pioneering text mining company Exfluency, and a term validator for the Spanish Supercomputing Center and the CNIO (National center of cancer research.

In December 2024 he presented his own dictionary of translation EN>SPA of medical terms ( mugumed.com), a revolutionary, personal work with almost 10 000 terms in February 2025. It is the first born-digital dictionary of its kind and the only one posted since the classic previous comparable work, now 25 years old.