In recent years, the medical community has become increasingly aware of the importance of clear language, and in many countries guidelines have been established in order to make medical texts more easily understandable. However, contrastive analyses have shown that the orientation towards improved communication varies from country to country: in this respect, Italy seems to lag behind other countries, especially because existing recommendations are not always applied in practice. In multilingual communicative situations, translators can contribute to enhance comprehension, for instance by adopting specific strategies for the use of terms; in this respect, they can find a useful resource in terminology collections paying due attention both to existing guidelines and to the analysis of relevant corpora. The present paper focuses on the peculiarities of three text types and puts forward some proposals for terminographic practice.
