Who is the most suitable for performing a technical translation: a professional in the field with translation skills or a professional translator?
Edited on: 23/09/2019
By: TDX PERU SAC
Currently, some believe that anyone who is fluent in a foreign language and has a professional training in the technical field (engineering, architecture, information technology, etc.) or scientific (medicine, pharmacy, nursing, etc.) can perform a quality technical translation . However, when deciding who to turn to for the translation of a document, society values more the linguistic training of a professional translator, compared to a technical and / or scientific training.
But what are the skills that each of these characters have developed for document translation?
On the one hand we have technical and / or scientific career professionals, who since their university preparation years have always been in contact with articles, essays and other literature related to their professional field in different languages, but especially in English. This with the objective of keeping up to date with the new advances that occur in its field. Therefore, they know with certainty the terminology used since they use it daily; contrary to a professional translator, who suddenly has not been in contact with certain very technical terms. For example, a doctor is more likely to know the translation of “allograft”, “blunt dissection” and “bioburden” without having to go to a reference dictionary, so, theoretically, he would translate a medical text faster .
Now, if it only depended on the knowledge of terminology to perform a quality technical translation, things would be very simple. The reality is different. To translate a text correctly, in addition to knowing the terms, it is necessary to have tools that allow to build a coherent and precise sentence at the grammar level, and according to the context and the information that you want to convey in the text. These linguistic tools described above are acquired by translators throughout their academic training.
The person who translates must be able to write in a technical language according to the characteristics of the target language. It is not simply “translate as it would sound better in my head” but to translate respecting the writing style of each language. Many people, for example, when trying to translate a text of basic or technological sciences such as engineering, from Spanish to English, tend to maintain the same syntactic construction as the source language. For example, if we wanted to translate “The optimization of cryopreservation protocols requires more evaluations”, who have no experience translating would build the phrase in English as is the scheme in Spanish, that is, “The optimization of the protocols requires more evaluations”. However, the English language is characterized by being more concise in its construction, with a smaller use of connectors compared to Spanish or other languages. In addition to being a scientific text, the language must be objective and direct, so the most appropriate translation would be “Optimizing protocols requires further evaluations”.
Now, we could say, in this case, that translators of technical texts have a difficult mission: to handle the technical language of all science, an impossible reality. What makes an efficient translator in the handling of certain types of texts, are the courses and / or postgraduate courses of specialization that can take in parallel or after finishing the degree, such as translation of medical, technological, legal texts, etc. This constant training and years of practice make a translation graduate become a true expert in the technical translation of one or more areas.
To all of the above, the question arises: What professionals should I then entrust a technical translation with total security?
In TDX PERU we believe that the quality of a technical translation depends on the level of technical and linguistic knowledge that the team that processes the translation possesses. And we mention the team, because we are convinced that the joint work of specialized translators and professionals in the area that provide more knowledge about quite specific terms results in the quality of the translation being highly reliable.