For a translation to read well, usually two important requirements must be fulfilled. Firstly, the translator must understand the source text and be a good target language writer. And secondly, the language style and the word choice must be adequate to the type of text. In other words, if the grammar is correct, but the specialised terms are noticeably wrong, the translation has automatically failed to achieve its purpose. This is the visible side of terminology work, a key element of the translation process.
Below I will explain what terminology is and how terminology work is performed in practice as part of professional translation services.
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What is terminology?
Terminology is, to put it simply, the totality of specific or specialised terms occurring in one text and/or in a given subject area.
For example, a divorce decree contains legal terms, i. e. the terminology of law. A “simple” birth certificate also contains specific terms, namely those of legal and bureaucracy language.
Terminology work is not only about words (nomenclature), but also and above all about the ideas (definitions) materialised in words.
That means that translators have the duty to understand each and every word in order to translate the underlying concept correctly into the target language.
Why is terminology work important?
Using adequate terminology is the most important element of language style. After all, if a sentence is well written and the terminology of the subject area in question was not adhered to, the text won’t be understood and will give room to misinterpretation. Therefore, important texts must adhere to adequate terminology.
The same applies to translations as well:
If a translator doesn’t transfer the specialised terminology of the text to the target language correctly, the translated text will be misunderstood and won’t achieve its purpose. This results in a bad translation.
How to identify a bad translation based on terminology?
A bad translation can be identified, for instance, when the document has been translated word for word or when an inexperienced translator hasn’t paid attention to so-called false friends.
This happens, for example, when thoughtlessly adopting translations from a bilingual dictionary without independently performing solid research. Such dictionaries are, after all, known to only present a list of out-of-context, possibly adequate translations depending on the situation and should be used, at the most, as a preparation tool or as an inspiration before performing solid terminology research.
The same applies to mindlessly adopting terms “from the internet”.
How is bilingual terminology work performed?
In translation practice, terminology work is about researching the definition of a term in both the source and target languages using trustworthy sources as well as conscientiously validating and recording such definitions. Thus, it’s not about simply replacing words in a language with words from a different language.
Until the late 1990s, it was common for translators to research bilingual terminology in a specialised library. This was done with the help of monolingual dictionaries and specialised books from the subject area in question, such as the “Merck Manual” for medical language or law case studies for legal language.
Ever since the arrival of large search engines (first Altavista and Yahoo, then Google), terminology work has moved to the internet. After all, the internet is a huge text corpus containing more and more scientific and other niche texts with which the word choice and the language style of subject-area specialists can be studied.
Unfortunately, though, the internet also contains more and more trash, which makes it more difficult to find trustworthy internet resources. This means that, nowadays, the effort involved in researching and validating specialised terminology found on the internet is significantly high. Only trained translators are able to sort the wheat from the chaff. Thus, researching terminology on the internet serves only as a complement to the expertise of an already specialised translator.
It’s worth noting that a given specialised term may have more than one possible translation. After all, the use of specialised terms – just as with other kinds of words – is determined by regional, historical or cultural factors. It’s part of a professional translator’s expertise to verify if a given translation of a given specialised term is indeed adequate to the translated text’s target audience.
How is terminology consistency ensured in professional translations?
After performing solid research of and validating specialised terminology, the next step is ensuring terminology consistency. It doesn’t suit the purpose if a specialised term is translated inconsistently throughout a text.
Thus, to ensure consistency of specialised terminology, professional translators use the terminology management feature of a translation environment tool. Such programme, which is basically a database, stores the bilingual terminology that has already been researched. The advantage is that if a stored specialised term appears a second time in a text, the programme will recognise it and, if configured accordingly, will tell the user that the second occurrence of the term has been translated inconsistently compared with the first one.
Of course, the process described above can be performed manually without using any software. Alter all, trained translators have acquired the skills to perform such work. However, considering the large number of texts that have to be translated within the shortest time frame possible, manually verifying terminology consistency is simply not viable from a business point of view.
