The article examines the different ways in which various types of shortened forms are employed in Polish-English translation of a corpus of medical articles found in the Case Report section of Acta Angiologica, a bilingual quarterly for vascular specialists. A comparative analysis of the source and target texts is conducted to determine the reasons for the use and non-use of abridged forms in medical translation. On the one hand, attention is devoted to how the source text abbreviations are handled in translation. On the other hand, the focus is on those cases in which an abbreviated form is used in the target text regardless of its absence in the source language version.