When a translator begins to work as a true career, he or she believes that the job consists of simply receiving texts to be translated without any further data on the area of specialization.
This is far from today’s reality. The translation industry right now is highly specialized by sector of the market. Therefore, each translator specializes in the terminology of a particular market segment (engineering, medicine, contracts, administration). Likewise, each client has its own language preferences with respect to the vocabulary used in their translations.
And on this point I want to stop to focus on one thing. Beyond the right expressions according to the accepted official dictionaries and style guides, clients seek consistency and terminology that “plays” with the advertising slogans that it has recently launched in the market, for example. In this framework, linguistic harmony must be individually customized for each client and therefore customized using client glossaries, reflecting the translation that has been used and that is the only valid for projects for that client, not factoring in the other possible correct translations that can be produced by other translators in the industry.
It is the customer who should make these preferences available to the translation team before starting the project, because it better complements the rest of the work flow of both the agency and the client. We know that every company has its own personality, its own business profile in the market. The profile should be reflected in their translations through this glossary, which will be readily available for all translators involved in the project, as the custom glossaries are automatically loaded into most Computer Assisted Translation software.
On terminology management of each project, we have already spoken at length in What is MultiTerm?
(Versión en español: Glosarios Personalizados para Traducción Especializada)
