Terminology and translation

Beside specialists, TRANSLATORS and interpreters are also major users of terminology when they mediate communication between specialists.

TRANSLATION is a process aimed at facilitating communication between speakers of different languages. Multilingual terminological activity supports technical TRANSLATION. TRANSLATION implies understanding the source text and this requires knowledge of the specific terms of the source and target languages. This means, in turn, the technical TRANSLATORS must have some familiarity with the subject matter they are translating.

A good technical TRANSLATION not only has to express the same content as the source text, but it also has to do so in the forms that a native reader of the target language would use. In the case of specialized TRANSLATION, the reader will be specialist in the field. As a result, good technical TRANSLATORS must choose the topics they want to work in and attain minimal competence in some specific field in order to be certain to respect the content and form of the two languages they work in.

To do their job TRANSLATORS depend on bilingual and or multilingual vocabularies of the terms occurring in the text. This dose not mean, however, that TRANSLATORS do not prepare terminology themselves. On occasion they have to act as terminologists to find vocabularies nor in specialized data banks. Besides, the time constraints within which TRANSLATORS have to work may not allow them to hand the task over to a terminologist.

In addition, to the equivalents in other languages, terminology prepares for TRANSLATORS must contain contexts that provide information on how to use the term, and, ideally, provide information about the concept in order to ensure TRANSLATORS use the precise form to refer to a specific content.

Terminological equivalence is the key to multilingual terminology. The authors of bilingual or multilingual technical dictionaries often start from the principle that terminologies reflect objective structures in the real world. In fact, the way the real world is reflected in the in the structure of a special language may not be the same across languages, especially in fields that are not highly structured such as arts and social sciences.

برگرفته از کتاب Terminology:  Theory, Methods and Applications نوشتهً Teresa Cabre