When you understand that translation is not just about replacing words with words, you soon arrive at the correct conclusion that the translator's career is a challenging one - especially if you are translating something where people expect particularly rigid translations of certain terms.
Personally, I distinguish "terminology" from "jargon". And "jargon" is not necessarily unique to the strongly specialist professional fields: law, medicine, technology. Good examples of decadent street drugs culture jargon include not just such nomenclature as "ganja", "buddha", "bomb", "sweet Mary Jane" and countless other names (and those are just for one kind of drug), but also "sparking a blunt". The more you immerse yourself in it (which I certainly DON'T advise, by the way), the more you become able to talk about this sort of thing in a manner that is incomprehensible to anyone who has made a name for themselves as a dealer or as a "junkie" - the kind of people your parents and teachers and the police always tell you to avoid.
But terminology is a lot more concerned with using words that are a lot more common in everyday parlance; at least, I think it is. I once heard a story of someone whose mother tongue was not English, translating some technical document into English; she wrote "magnetic meadows" where it should have been... anyone? Yes, "magnetic fields". "Magnetic fields" is what I call a solid and clear example of "terminology" as opposed to jargon.
"Drive" is a common terminology word - in documents pertaining to mechanical devices you will often find references to systems or features which "drive" liquids from a to b, say - they don't "force" the liquids (it's just that it seems to me that the layman would be more inclined to use the verb "force" over "drive").
What do you think?
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By the way, the concept of "correct terminology" was very much on mind during my last translation project (a specialist contract). It was from French to English. I couldn't help but think it best to consider that "présent contrat" meant "existing contract" rather than "THIS contract (not any other, separate, contract".
ReplyDeleteThen there was "conclure un contrat". To "conclude a contract"? Would this be a matter of signing it or satisfying its aims as part of whatever agenda it belonged to?