TECHNICAL STYLE

Further, unless its non-technical language is jazzed up and popularised, it is usually free from emotive language, connotations, sound-effects and original metaphor, if it is well written. French medical texts are often just the contrary, and the translator's job is precisely to eliminate these features. Thus le triptyque de ce gouvernail et les d&mes longeant la radio et le sonar font saillie, one is unnecessarily translating the descriptive term ('smooth surface' - i.e., surface lisse) by a technical term (forme hydrodynamique), and eliminating the TL linguistic contrast between lisse and hydrodynamique. (See Delisle, 1982.)

Professional technical translators have a tendency to make a mystique out of their craft by rejecting any descriptive term where a TL technical term exists; a technical term (standardised language) is always more precise (narrower in semantic range) than a descriptive term (non-standardised language). It is often insisted that one must use only words that miners at the coalface, teachers at the board (!), farmers presumably at the grass roots would use - incidentally the mystique tends to ignore any distinction between the spoken and written language, which goes against good translation.

But what if the original uses descriptive terms? Take a piece on machining schedules: Dam ce cas il est tres rentable d'utiliser les machines courantes... sans rien crier mais en prevoyant en detail leur adaptation et leur montage. Les machines courantes could be translated as 'general-purpose machines' in anticipation of leur adaptation et leur montage. In this translation, the semi-technical term 'general-purpose' replaces the descriptive courantes of the original. More likely, courantes is in contrast with sans rien creer, and could be translated by the descriptive terms

'standard', 'normal', or 'currently in use'.

Whilst the technical term may be a translator's find (trouvaille) and will help to acclimatise the professional reader, it is I think mistaken to invariably prefer it, bearing in mind that the descriptive term in the SL text may serve other communi- cative purposes. In cases where the piece is technical and there is clear evidence (as there often is) that the descriptive, the more general and generic term is probably only being used because the narrower technical term is rare or lacking in the SL, the use of the technical term in the TL text is certainly preferable.

Conversely, where an SL technical term has no known TL equivalent, adescriptive term should be used. What to do with dismicrobismo murino? 'Microbism' being 'a state of infestation with microbes', the dis- (English: dys-) appears redundant. If one cannot risk 'murine microbism', a descriptive term such as 'acute infestation by microbes, due to rat fleas' is safer. Again rideau de terre, a technical term for a bank separating two terraced fields, is translated as a 'ridge' in La Durie's Montaillou. Little is lost in the context.