You need to be an expert in a highly specialised field

There is a common belief that in order to be a good technical translator, you need to be an expert in a highly specialised field and you can’t specialise in more than one or two subject areas.

But the reality is that, armed with a good and solid understanding of the basic principles and technologies, many technical translators can, in the words of Robinson (2003:128) “fake it”. He says that “translators… make a living pretending to be (or at least to speak or write as if they were) licensed practitioners of professions that they have typically never practiced.” They are like actors “getting into character”.

However, lest technical translators be branded a bunch of scurrilous charlatans who deceive unwitting clients we need to put Robinson’s comments into perspective. The notion of pretending to be an expert means that the translator should have enough subject knowledge either to know how to deal with the text or to be able to acquire whatever additional information is needed. Researching a new subject area for a translation is always easier when you know at least something about it compared to when you know nothing at all. It is, therefore, essential that translators have excellent research skills, make full use of parallel texts and have a very good understanding of general scientific and technological principles. Technical translators need to “impersonate” the original author who is generally, though not always, an expert in a particular field and they need to write with the same authority as an expert in the target language. So in this case, the real challenges for the technical translator are to be able to research subjects and to have expert knowledge of the way experts in a particular field write texts. We can summarise the essential areas of expertise for technical translators:

• subject knowledge
• writing skills
• research skills
• knowledge of genres and text types
• pedagogical skills

With regard to subject knowledge, O’Neill (1998:69) says that medicine, nursing, dentistry etc. all share some subject knowledge, e.g. physics, biology, pharmacology etc. Consequently, what are normally regarded as quite separate specialisms frequently share the same basic knowledge. The same can be said of various other types of technological area: engineering, mechanics, construction etc. They all share more or less the same core knowledge.

When it comes to specialised subject knowledge, it is a truism that you cannot master every area so it’s probably best to get a good foundation in the more generic, transferable subject areas and rely on this together with an ability to research new areas to deal with unfamiliar subjects. So for a technical translator, gaining a good understanding of the basics of science and technology can provide a good basis for diverse applications within technical translation.