MedineLingua is a comprehensive resource for learning medical languages, hosted and maintained by the Faculty of Medicine & Pharmacy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in partnership with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and several other European medical universities. The website is aimed at students and doctors preparing for clinical work, and has a lot to offer medical translators, interpreters, and writers, as well.

What you’ll find

Each language section is built from the same set of content types:

General Vocabulary. In the non-English sections, General Vocabulary comes as bilingual tables, with English on the left and the target language on the right. They contain both single terms and whole phrases, such as the questions a doctor asks when taking a patient’s history. In the Portuguese section, for example, the vocabulary is organized as follows:

• Medical Environment: Personnel, Medical Equipment, Finding your way around, Daily Routine
• Taking the medical history: General Introductions, Personal Information, Pain & Symptoms, Present complaint, Past medical history
• Physical Examination: General Phrases, Head, Ear, Nose, Throat, Heart, Lungs, Abdomen & Urology, Skin & Nervous System, Musculoskeletal System, Gynecology
• Tests & Medication: Medical Studies, Lab Tests, Procedures, Medication

Disciplines. Bilingual vocabulary by specialty, in collapsible tables, with downloadable PDFs for some topics. The number of specialties differs by language. The German section, for example, covers cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, GI/liver, nephrology, neurology, orthopedics, and psychiatry.

Abbreviations. An alphabetical list of medical abbreviations in the target language with their expansions, also available as a PDF.

Anatomy Charts. Anatomical images labeled in English and the target language. You can download each one separately or get them all in a single PDF.

Teaching resources

If you teach medical language or prefer to learn by doing, go to “Teaching” > “Resources”. There you’ll find games, teaching materials, clinical cases, a handbook, and conversation videos for medical-language classes, with a course structure based on the intensive medical-language courses at Charité. The vocabulary cards for a memory game are available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Norwegian.

Click “Open resource” to go to MedineLingua and explore your language.