• Nem Talált Eredményt

PART 1: THE MODERN TRANSLATOR’S PROFILE

7. The term

In this section we are going to look at the term, how to define it and how to identify it.

As a start, let us see what happens when we black out the terms in a text. It will become very difficult to identify what it is about [the example is created based on Picht (2010)]:

Lavandula (common name lavender) is a genus of 39 known species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae.

Lavender is still one of the most recognized scents in the world. The German Commission E commended lavender for treating insomnia, nervous stomach, and anxiety. The British Herbal Pharmacopoeia lists lavender as a treatment for

flatulence, colic, and depressive headaches, and many modern herbal practitioners use the herb to treat migraines in menopause. In Spain, lavender is added to teas to treat diabetes and insulin resistance.

Lavender is particularly rich in aromatic molecules called esters, which are antispasmodic, pacifying and tonic, while other molecules give it its antiviral, bacterial and anti-inflammatory powers. Of the many therapeutic attributes of Lavender oil, respiratory relief would be one of the most consistently reported benefits.

However, if we cover up other words in the text, the gist of it immediately becomes clear and only the details are lost:

Lavandula (common name lavender) is a genus of 39 known species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae.

Lavender is still one of the most recognized scents in the world. The German Commission E commended lavender for treating insomnia, nervous stomach, and anxiety. The British Herbal Pharmacopoeia lists lavender as a treatment for flatulence, colic, and depressive headaches, and many modern herbal practitioners use the herb to treat migraines in menopause. In Spain, lavender is added to teas to treat diabetes and insulin resistance.

Lavender is particularly rich in aromatic molecules called esters, which are antispasmodic, pacifying and tonic, while other molecules give it its antiviral, bacterial and anti-inflammatory powers. Of the many therapeutic attributes of Lavender oil, respiratory relief would be one of the most consistently reported benefits.

Now let’s see the whole text:

Lavandula (common name lavender) is a genus of 39 known species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae.

Lavender is still one of the most recognized scents in the world. The German Commission E commended lavender for treating insomnia, nervous stomach, and anxiety. The British Herbal Pharmacopoeia lists lavender as a treatment for flatulence, colic, and depressive headaches, and many modern herbal practitioners use the herb to treat migraines in menopause. In Spain, lavender is added to teas to treat diabetes and insulin resistance.

Lavender is particularly rich in aromatic molecules called esters, which are antispasmodic, pacifying and tonic, while other molecules give it its antiviral, bacterial and anti-inflammatory powers. Of the many therapeutic attributes of Lavender oil, respiratory relief would be one of the most consistently reported benefits.

From the above it is clear that the terms can be considered the key concepts of the text, they provide the information density of the text. When selecting terms, one must make a decision over the concepts that belong to the topic at hand, i.e. domain.

Terms usually do not display any formal peculiarities, but can be identified as pragmatic and communicative units (Cabré 1998: 81).

During practical work, when processing a text, we can select terms using manual or automatic extraction. Despite being slow, an advantage of manual extraction is that the person doing the extraction will get a deep understanding of the text, while machine (semi-automatic) extraction software working on linguistic or statistical principles (or both) has the advantage of being fast. Terms are usually nouns, but they can also be verbs, adjectives, adverbs or multi-word lexemes, collocations (Wright and Budin 1997: 3).

The term can be defined as a lexeme, number, sign or a combination of these that denotes a concept in a given domain (Fóris 2005a: 37). According to this definition BL55 is a term, it is one of the codes used in the bakery industry in Hungary (B = wheat, L = small ground wheat flour, 55 = an indicator of the wheat bran content).

As translators usually think within a context, they tend to collect terms for their own glossary together with a so called minimal context. For example they tend to extract versions such as ‘for the registrar’ instead of the term registrar. The terminologist would place such contextual extra information into the context field.

Of course, the translator works under tight deadlines, and the above method allows for the recording of more information at a time. This is such a common practice among translators that the EU’s multilingual, interactive terminology database (IATE) also follows this principle, unless users set the search field to find expressions, which in this case will be highlighted with a different background colour.

Terminologists record terms organised into domains. When processing a domain, they usually do not apply traditional lexicographical methods, namely they do not proceed in alphabetical or thematic order. Instead, they select concepts and terms that belong to a domain and subdomains after mapping and elaborating the conceptual and terminological systems. The difference and relations between

terms can be illustrated in graphs (see Figure 2) and tables (see Table 2) (for details see: Wüster 1985: 137–201). This facilitates the delimitation of concepts, and identifying relations of subordination, superordination or co-ordination of concepts. When using graphs, nodes (classification criteria) can be used to facilitate grouping.

As an example, Figure 2 below shows the various statuses of a contract from a civil law perspective (see the explanation of the terms at the following link: http://

anglofon.com/compareb2u4t08).

Figure 2

Statuses of a contract in civil law

Table 2 displays the various terms used in inheritance law for the distributor and the recipient of the estate in intestate and testamentary processes.

Table 2

Terms for distributor and recipient in inheritance law

Intestate process Testamentary process Distributor of the estate administrator

(administratrix)

executor (executrix)

Recipient of the estate heir (heiress) beneficiary

(See the explanation of the difference between the above terms at the following link: http://anglofon.com/difference-between-testamentary-succession-and-intestate-succession).

There are many types of terminology tools, e.g. paper based or electronic glossaries, terminological dictionaries, however, in practice the most popular and most widely used form is the electronic, preferably online termbase. There are several versions of the latter, such as a  databank, a  knowledge bank or a terminological information system, depending on the type of information the database contains. The selection is therefore very wide, extending from simpler tools to state of the art knowledge bases.

In document The Modern Translator and Interpreter (Pldal 66-70)