The Role of Illustrations in Popularizing Medical Discourse

This article deals with illustrations in popularizing scientific discourse of medicine. This visual tool can be considered as a strategy of paraphrasing, since popularizing journalists simplify and make some information more explicit by using other semiotic information related to the main scientific content. We will analyse a comparable corpus composed of the online versions of two American, two French and two Italian magazines of science popularization. The role of illustrations, as well as their usefulness in terms of text comprehension, will be highlighted through a socioterminological approach (Gaudin 2003). As far as a typological distinction of the illustrations is concerned, we will follow a Peircean classification (Fisette 2009; Lathene-Da Cunha 2013). Some remarks will emerge from the comparison between the magazines, per type and per language. We will confirm that some illustrations contribute to a better intelligibility of the article content, whereas some others influence readers’ sensitivity.