The Contribution of Terminology to Text Analysis in Specialised Translation

Traditionally, terminological products such as glossaries have been used to find
suitable equivalents in the coding stage of translation, i.e. in the reformulation
of the message in the target language. Developments in terminology have led to
the creation of glossaries and terminological data banks which now often
include background information on terms. On these grounds, an experiment has
been conducted with fourth-year students of the translation course at the Scuola
Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori of the University of
Trieste to ascertain whether terminological products can also be of service in
the preliminary stage of translation, i.e. in message decoding through text
analysis. A model of terminological text analysis for the purposes of specialised
translation was devised and a group of students was asked to adopt it for the
experiment, while a control group of students was given a list of translation
equivalents and was allowed to use other reference material. Although further
tests are needed to confirm the authors' hypotheses, the results of the experiment
suggest that terminological products including background information on
terms may partially make up for lack of subject-specific knowledge when
conducting text analysis in the preliminary stage of translation of highly
specialised texts.