Customer Reviews

Medical Dictionary/Diccionario de Medicina/Dicionário de termos médicos: english-spanish-portuguese/espanol-inglés-portugués/ ... (English, Spanish and Portuguese Edition)

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I expected more from this dictionary. I looked up the word lice, louse, and pediculosis in the English section and there were no entries for these words. Could it be that these terms were not in the dictionary? It turns out that when I looked up piojo (Esp) and piolho (Por), I discovered that the listing in English was under head louse. Similarly, pubic louse was ladilla (Esp) and chato (Por), but nowhere was pubic louse and head louse cross-referenced. In Spanish and Portuguese, these two terms are different, but in common parlance in English we call both infestations lice. The casual user of the dictionary would have a difficult time figuring this out.

This dictionary is better than nothing, but this is one time where an online cross reference of medical terms would be much more efficient. Maybe English, Portuguese, and Spanish-speaking medical schools will get together and create a better online dictionary.

If this dictonary were sold as a CD-ROM, an exhaustive search of the dictionary, which would have taken only a few seconds on a computer, would have been able to find the term head louse when a person searched for louse. The dictionary is useful, but you might be disappointed at what you get for your [money].

I bought this for a young US medical student who has a Brazilian husband and plans to work in Brazil. Someone else gave her Stedman's expensive one, which she loves--and she doesn't even look at this one. When I gave her the Nolte-Schlegel dictionary, I told her that it was for reading rather than reference, because I had read that its coverage was hit-or-miss, and having just seen both books and the recipient using just the one, while I looked in Nolte-Schlegel, I agree. This one looks as if it may still be useful to introduce someone to medical vocabulary, and of course it includes Spanish.

Some translations are wrong. Slightly more complex terms are not available. Definitely NOT worth the price.

This really boils down to just a basic dictionary. Missing are the highly technical terms you'd find in Dorland's or Stedman's. Fine for lower level work, but for me, as a medical translator, it nearly always fails to produce. Nevertheless, the terms see accurate enough.

It lacks definitions for basic medical terms such as stroke for instance, and the Portuguese translations are very poor. Not worth purchasing.