The Importance of Terminology Knowledge

If experience is the best teacher, does that mean "deductive" resources like classes in specialized terminology, dictionaries and other reference materials, and theoretical work on terminology management are useless? Not at all.

The important points to remember are: (1) everything is experience (we are never not experiencing things, even in our sleep); and (2) some experiences are richer and more memorable than others. Working in a specialized field is an experience; so is reading a highly abstract theoretical study of the terminology used in that field. The former is more likely to be memorable than the latter, because interacting with people in actual use-situations and seeing the practical applicability of the terminology to real objects and people and contexts provides more "channels" or "modes" or "handles" for the brain to process the information through; in neuro­logical terms, abstract theorizing is relatively stimulus-poor.

But this does not mean, again, that the more abstract channels for presenting information are worthless; only that we must all work harder, teachers, students, writers and readers, to infuse abstract discourse with the rich experiential complexity of human life.

This may mean teachers offering students, or writers offering readers, hands-on exercises that facilitate the learner's exploration of an abstract model through several experiential channels — visual, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory. This is sometimes thought of as "pandering to the worst element," mainly because abstract thought is considered "higher" than holistic experience; in fact it is simply "pandering" to the way the brain actually learns best.

Or it may mean students and readers employing their own holistic techniques to work out in their own practical hands-on experience how the abstract model works. This is how the "best" (i.e., most linguistically, logically, and mathematically intelligent) students have always processed abstract thought: unconsciously they flesh it out with sights and sounds and other visceral experiences from their own lives. This is in fact the only way that anyone can make sense of an abstract model or system: all deduction must make a detour through induction; all theory must have some mode of access to practice; all abstraction must derive from, and be referable back to, the concrete. Abstract theoretical thought, deduction as the highest form of logical reasoning, provides an economy of expression that the rich repeti­tions and circumlocutions of experiential and practice-oriented induction can never match. But for that very reason this sort of thought is difficult to apprehend without practical applications. Abstraction is a shorthand that saves enormous amounts of time — but only when one knows the language that it shortens and can refer each squiggle back to a natural word or phrase that has meaning in real-life situations.

One of the most important aspects of the translator's job is the management of terminology: being exposed to it, evaluating its correctness or appropriateness in specific contexts, storing and retrieving it. The focal nature of terminology for translation has made terminology studies one of the key subdisciplines within the broader field of translation studies; learning specialized terminology is one of the main emphases in any course on legal, medical, commercial, or other technical translation; and "How do you say X, Y, and Z in language B?" is the most commonly asked question in on-line translator discussion groups like Lantra-L.

But terminology studies as they are traditionally conceived are typically grounded methodologically in the neglect of one essential point: that terminology is most easily learned (i.e., stored in memory so as to facilitate later recall) in context — in actual use-situations, in which the people who use such terms in their daily lives are talking or writing to each other. Not that terminologists ignore or discount this fact; its importance is, on the contrary, widely recognized in terminology studies. But the subdiscipline's very focus on terms as opposed to, say, people, or highly contextualized conversations, or workplaces, reflects its fundamental assumption that terminology is a stable objective reality that exists in some systematic way "in language" and is only secondarily "used" by people — often used in confusing and contradictory ways, in fact, which is what makes the imagination of a pure or stable "primary" state so attractive.

 

As it has been mentioned before, translation has been called the profession of second choice; if your first choice was something radically different, you are in an excellent position to specialize in the translation of texts written by practitioners of your previous profession. Other people choose translation simultaneously with another profession, and may even feel guilty about their inability to choose between them; they too have an enormous advantage over other translators working in the same field, because of their "insider" command of terminology.

Most translators and interpreters, however, are not so lucky. That’s why some translators solve this problem by specializing in a given field — medical translations, legal translations, etc., some even in such narrow fields as patents, or insurance claims — and either taking coursework in that field or reading in it widely, in both languages. Interpreters hired for a weekend or a week or a month in a given field will study up on that field in advance. Gradually, over the years, these translators and interpreters become so expert at pretending to be practitioners of a profession they've never practiced that third parties ask them for medical or legal (or whatever) advice.

Once again, it should go without saying that the translator who is not sure how a real doctor would sound in the target language is obligated to have the product of this imaginative process checked by someone who is sure. This sort of translation inevitably involves making mistakes. Without first-hand knowledge of the professions or workplaces from which the text has been taken, it is impossible for the translator to avoid bad choices among the various terminological alternatives in a dictionary entry.

But note two things. First, by projecting herself or himself into a profession or a workplace, the translator gains an intuitive guide to individual word-choices. This guide is, of course, never wholly reliable— it is, after all, based on guesswork, imaginative projections, not (much) actual experience—, but it is better than nothing. Some translators would dispute this, saying that no guess is better than a bad one, and if all you can do is make bad guesses you shouldn't have accepted the job at all — perhaps shouldn't even be a translator at all. But everyone has to start somewhere; no one, not even the best translator, is ever perfectly proficient on every job s/he does; all translation contains an element of guesswork. The translator who never guessed, who refused even in a first rough draft to write down anything about which s/he; was not absolutely certain, would rarely finish a job. There are some texts that are so easy that no guesswork is involved; perhaps in some areas of specialization such texts even eventually become the norm. But most translators have to guess at (and later check and/or have checked) some words in almost every text they translate.

Second, it is always better to guess in a pattern, guided by a principle (even if only an imagined one), than to guess at random. The style or tone produced by a series of guesses based on an imaginative projection may be wrong, but at least it will most likely be recognizable, and thus easier for a checker to fix. The translator who, like an actor or a novelist, pretends to be a practitioner in the field of the source text will probably impart to the finished translation a tonal or rhetorical coherence that will make it read more naturally — even if it is "off."

The rule of translation of specialized texts, therefore, might go like this: projecting yourself imaginatively into the professional activities of the source author will guide your individual choice of words, phrases, and ultimately register in a more coherent fashion than a focus on "terminology" or register.

Obviously, important as the ability to make imaginative or creative leaps and project yourself into the professional habitus of the source author is the conversation with people who work in the field. The more first-, second-, or third-hand experi­ence a translator has of a given profession or workplace or job-related jargon, the better able s/he will be to translate texts in that field.

Let us imagine three separate scenarios in which such job-related experience can help the translator translate.

 

1. You have actually worked in the field, but it's been years, and the terminology has dimmed in your memory. (Future translators should always have the foresight to write five or ten pages of terminological notes to help jog their memories years later, when they need to remember these specialized terms for a translation. Unfortunately, few of us have such foresight.) You open the dictionary or some other term database, and there, from among four or five possibilities, the right word jumps off the page and into the translation. Your term-management software offers you a word that you instantly recognize as the right one, and you use it.

How do you jog your memory? Not necessarily by bearing down on the "missing" word (squinting your eyes hard, tightening your head muscles — as you may have noticed, this doesn't work) and hoping to force it out. A better way: you daydream about your experiences in the job where you knew that word, letting your mind roam freely over the people you worked with, the places you worked, some memorable events from that time; remember driving to and from work, etc. Forget all about needing to know a particular word; chances are, it will come to you suddenly (if not immediately, then an hour or two later).

2 You've never actually done the job before, but you have lived and worked on the peripheries of the job for years: as a legal secretary around lawyers, as a transcriptionist in a hospital, etc. Or you have good friends who work in the field, and hear them talking about it daily. Or you habitually have lunch at a restaurant where people from that field all go for lunch, and overhear them talking shop every day. Or you are an acute observer and a good listener and draw people out whenever you talk to them, no matter who they are or what they do, so that, after a chance encounter with a pharmacist or a plumber or a postal worker you have a reasonably good sense of how they talk and how they see their world.

3. Or you've read about the field extensively, watched (and taped and rewatched) shows about it on television, and frequently imagined yourself as a practitioner in it. Some of the books you've read about it are biographies and autobiographies of people in the field, so that, even though you have no first­hand experience of it, your stock of second-hand information is rich and varied.

Pretending to be a practitioner in the field, therefore, is relatively easy for you, even though there are large gaps in your terminological knowledge. Creating a plausible register is no problem; when you focus on actual scenes from books and television shows, it often seems as if you know more termi­nology than you "actually" do — because you have been exposed to more words than you can consciously recall, and your unconscious mind produces them for you when you slip into a productive daydream state. So you stare at the dictionary, and recognize none of the words; but one unmistakably feels right. You know you're going to have to check it later, but for now that intuitive "rightness" is enough.

You have neither job experience nor an abiding interest in the field, but you know somebody who does, and so you get them on the phone, or fax or e-mail them; as you describe the words you're looking for, you listen for the note of confidence in their voices when they know the correct word with absolute calm and easy certainty. It's like when a foreigner is saying to you, "What's the machine called, you know, it's in the kitchen, you put bread in it and push down, and wires gel: hot, and —" "Oh yeah," you say easily, "a toaster." When you hear that tone of voice, you know you can trust your friend's terminological instinct. When it is obvious that your friend isn't sure, that s/he is guessing, you listen to everything s/he has to say on the subject, say thanks, and call somebody else.

Or you get on to Lantra-L or some other translator listserv that you sub­scribe to and ask your question there. A translator list is an excellent place to go for terminological help, since the subscribers are themselves translators who know the kind of detail a translator needs to have in order to decide whether a given word is right or wrong. There are only two drawbacks of going to an e-mail discussion group. One is that the discussion of who uses what words how can become more interesting than the actual translation that pays the bills.

The other problem with going to a translator discussion group with a terminology question is that getting an answer may take anywhere from several hours to several days. At the end of the process you will know more than you ever wanted to know about the problematic terms (especially if you work in "major" European languages) — but the process may take longer than you can afford to delay.