Medical animations in patient education: Insights from PubMed and implications for translation training and translation didactics

Abstract

This paper examines the terminology employed across PubMed publications to refer to medical animations in patient education, also looking at how content is assessed, and the ways in which narrative clarity, aesthetic engagement, and scientific rigor are balanced. The findings reveal both terminological ambiguity when labeling “medical animation” for lay audiences, and heterogeneous content evaluation frameworks. The paper also highlights the absence of medical animations as an area of ​​research in translation research despite their growing role in multilingual health communication. And yet, their nature invites inquiry into multimodal translation strategies. Furthermore, medical animations can serve as a pedagogical tool for cultivating competencies that include multimodal literacy, visual literacy, collaborative knowledge negotiation, boundary-crossing inquiry, interdisciplinary conversation of narrative modes, scientific analysis, and creative synthesis of medical science, technology, visual communication, and language practices.