Intralingual and Interlingual Term Circulation in Medical TV Series: Analysing Medical Terms in English-Chinese Subtitles of The Good Doctor

Today, the movement of expert medical language into general vocabulary is increasingly influenced by audiovisual media. Despite its prevalence, few studies have explored how terms behave across different genres and languages, particularly when they enter into the language of fictional TV series. This study explores the phenomena of terms circulating outside their specialised domain and entering into general language, with a focus on the American medical TV series The Good Doctor and its Chinese version. It addresses two main objectives from both intra- and interlingual perspectives: first, it examines whether and how determinologisation occurs in The Good Doctor in English, focusing on the semantic changes of the medical terms. Second, it analyses the terminological shifts in the English-to-Chinese subtitle translations, specifically investigating deviations from three principles of equivalence in terminology translation: conceptual, denominative, and connotative. Employing a corpus-based approach, the research uses two comparable corpora for the intralingual analysis—anEnglish-specializedd medical corpus and the TV series’ English transcripts corpus. For interlingual analysis, a parallel corpus of the English subtitles and their Chinese translations is used. The investigation is based on the bilingual medical terms extracted from the medical TV series and their contexts. This study aims to gain a better understanding of term circulation between experts and laypeople from both intra- and interlingual perspectives and to illuminate the motivations behind these terminological changes in audiovisual media. The findings are also expected to shed light on the contextual factors influencing terminology translation.