The movement of medical terms into popular media falls into term circulation and has been well described in Terminology studies (e.g., Delavigne, 2020; Hill-Madsen & Pilegaard, 2019; Humbert-Droz, 2025). However, medical TV series, often treated as a subgenre of fiction à substrat professionnel (FASP), remain under-examined despite their abundant medical communications. With the “dual nature” (Ray, 2020: 80), these series must balance terminological precision for professional realism with accessibility for non-experts (Bonsignori, 2019: 117; Lu et al. 2024). Reconciling this paradoxical tension is likely to trigger semantic changes (Meyer & Mackintosh, 2000) and popularised reformulation (Delavigne, 2017: 41).
This presentation is part of an ongoing doctoral thesis on intralingual and interlingual term circulation in the American medical TV series The Good Doctor (TGD) and its Chinese translations. The current study presents the intralingual dimension of the English subtitles and addresses the question of how medical terms are used and change in TGD as they move into TV subtitles. Drawing on Textual Terminology and Socioterminology (Condamines & Picton, 2022; Condamines et al., 2025), the study combines discourse analysis (Delavigne, 2017) with corpus-assisted methods. The dataset comes from the English component (398, 865 tokens) of a self-built parallel subtitle corpus comprising 76 episodes of TGD. Subtitles are first manually coded by communicative roles (doctor-doctor vs. doctor-patient) in NVivo. The coded segments are then analysed for semantic change and reformulation strategies, and corpus concordance analysis complements this by identifying broader patterns across the dataset.
Preliminary findings reveal an imbalance in communicative groups, with doctor-doctor interactions occurring about twice as frequently as doctor-patient exchanges. Expert discourse aligns with professional registers, characterized by frequent multiword terms for semantic precision (León Araúz & Cabezas García, 2021: 212) and abbreviated forms for linguistic economy (Freixa, 2006: 61). In contrast, doctor-patient interactions exhibit clear popularised reformulation through various explanatory strategies (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004; Gotti, 2011) to enhance accessibility, including generalisation, definition, juxtaposition of lay equivalents, and symptom and treatment explanations. Notably, denominative variation and negative associations emerge across both communicative groups, possibly serving functional or discursive needs for comprehension (Freixa, 2006: 56-61) or dramatic effects.
The findings affirm the dual role of medical TV series in term circulation. Mirroring real-world discourse, TGD bridges the expert-lay gap for both fictional contexts and target lay viewers. Future steps will compare the subtitles with specialised medical corpora and investigation of how subtitling constraints influence the observed terminological patterns.
