I'm an infrequent contributor to this forum, but I cannot tolerate the plethora of incorrect English medical terms that seem to emerge from this website posing as legitimate English equivalents of medical terms encountered in non-English (French, Italian, Spanish, etc) source documents. It seems that most contributors to this website are not trained medical professionals, but linguists, philologists, and so forth. Unfortunately, mastering the source and target languages is hardly enough to ensure correct usage of medical, surgical, and technical English in medical texts. The latter requires:
1. Comprehension of the underlying principles of anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry, genetics, surgery, imaging, interventional radiology, biomedical engineering, etc.
2. Once the the previous criterion is fulfilled, the putative translator should be (or become) knowledgeable of the usage of the concerned term in the source language (French, German, etc) by reading and writing extensively in the specialty domain pertaining to that term in the respective language.
3. Then, the same translator should be cognizant of the nooks and crannies of the English-language professional literature published in that field, as if he or she were active English writers and speakers in that domain (e.g., almost like MDs dictating their op notes and summaries, researchers publishing the results and discussions of their own research, lecturers teaching students, etc).
In other words, it all boils down to being a lawyer when translating legal documents and being a doctor when translating medical texts. If you're not an MD and are yet supposed to translate a medical text, follow adamantly the three points espoused above.

The most condemnable practice that I've witnessed on this website is that of running searches on general web search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc) instead of medical textbooks and peer-reviewed databases like PubMed, EMBASE, eMedicine, UpToDate, etc, i.e., the bread and butter of medical professionals. The search words that are typed in and looked up by translators are, by and large, the original term or its transliterated (read: invented) English counterpart(s). Since the web is replete with myriads of incorrect terms, literal translations, false friends, false cognates, and scores of French-language, Italian-language, Spanish-language authors publishing their texts in English for more credit and impact, positive hits are obviously retrieved by those search engines for almost every transliteration, Franglais construction, and pseudo-anglicisms imaginable. Yet citing those half-baked and untrustworthy references as alleged proof of authority and validity, with the end result of misleading your peers and the general public, is a dismal disservice to science and unacceptable to us authors, researchers, medical editors and writers who have dedicated entire careers to ferret out the scientific truth and convey the fruit of our research in either written or spoken words.

Chris B. Teszler, MD, PhD, FFIAOL
Associate professor of otolaryngology, head & neck surgery
Clinical pharmacologist
Author, medical writer, editor, reviewer