Professional use of a translator can be extremely wide, and text interpreting must be carried out in fields such as medicine, psychology or biology, where specific terms are frequent and not always are we familiar with them nor understand everything. So, how does a professional translator deal with these situations? To speak the truth, first contacts with scientific translations that show specific vocabulary can prove themselves complicated, and therefore it forces us to get familiar with these words as soon as possible. In today’s article we will provide some tips and advices for these situations.
Getting familiar with specific vocabulary
As we mentioned at the beginning of this text, it is not rare that translators are lead to interpret texts coming from professional areas with specific terminology that, shall s/he was not familiar with it, it can be puzzling. In order to face these projects in an effective way, the key is to get accustomed with terminology so to understand it and interpret texts correctly. Let’s have a look at some key points:
Translator’s terminology research
The main ingredient for a proper translation of texts with specific terminology comes with the fact of understanding their meaning and of their terms. In order to do so, we should start a research process and get in touch with words and context in which they are found. We can have a look at reference literature for translators who seek to work with texts coming from certain fields, it proves itself very helpful and makes the process so much simpler.
Materials and secondary sources
In addition to consulting literature for translators working in some scientific or professional fields, we should always take also into account different sorts of secondary sources, such as glossaries and dictionaries, as a help in case some lack of knowledge or information regarding some terms is spotted.
Good time managing
Depending on the nature of the project, many translators prefer creating their own glossary of technical terms for every particular case. For that, the main thing to do is analyzing in first place if it is worth it, depending on the type of job, and then managing efficiently our time to provide excellent results.