Terminology work beginner’s guide
It is always when it comes to terminology management that I run out of time when teaching that electronic tools for translators course. It is such a shame, because the argument is so compelling: what are the tasks you spend most time on when doing a translation? Usually one of the most time consuming task is terminology research. Now although the internet in most cases allows you to save the time it takes to take the bus to the nearest university library, you still have lived through it yourself: you spend 20 minutes finding possible translations and another 10 eliminating all the wrong ones, finally setting for that best translation decision you can come up with. But what do you do? How do you document it? There are clever people out there - so one translator told me that when ever she finds a difficult term, she writes it down where she looked first - which is her trusted dictionary. I thought that is a cool idea!! But would you have to do anything else? Well - I say YES definitely!!!! (with as many exclamation marks). After spending 30 minutes on that term, you might as well make sure that you document your struggle. So in any case write it down. The next question is “where to write it down”. The answer: wherever you feel it is right - BUT think about what you write down. Is the translation really all you can come up with after 30 minutes search? What about all those terms you came across and they were wrong? What about the date and the job and the client? What about the context of the term in both languages? What about grammatical information, antonyms, synonyms and all those other yms?
And the other issue is how can you make sure you can mine all this information??
Here I am going again, running out of time when it comes to terminology work. So watch this space - there might be more coming.