ENGLISH - SPANISH GLOSSARY OF TRANSLATION INDUSTRY TERMS

Author: Richard Pérez-Mongard
Creation Date: 12/Aug/2013

Tags
Special code used in computer-aided translation software that marks a location in a text and a particular formatting variable for that location. When a document has complex formatting, correct handling of tags can be an issue and slows down the translating process.
Spanish: etiquetas (internas)

Target audience
The end users of translation services, or target readership.
Spanish: público objetivo

Target country
The country where the translation will be used.
Spanish: país objetivo

Target language
Language into which a text is translated.
Spanish: idioma meta- IM

Target readership
The end users of translation services.
Spanish: lectores objetivo

Target text
The text that the translator produces. The translation.
Spanish: texto meta, texto final

Terminology
A corpus of words or groups of two or more words that have special meanings in a field of knowledge.
Spanish: terminología, nomenclatura

Terminology extraction
It’s the extraction of individual terms from a text to create a monolingual or bilingual glossary.
Spanish: extracción de términos

Text alignment
The process of organising two language versions of a text side by side in order to identify equivalent segments.
Spanish: alineación de textos

Text function
What a text can do or be used for.
Spanish: función del texto

Text segment
Any piece of text separated from the rest by formal or arbitrary markers. CAT tools use formal markers (commas, full stops, exclamation marks, etc.) to determine the extension of segments.
Spanish: segmento de texto, segmento textual

Text type
Mainly describes the field or fields that are covered by the text.
Spanish: tipos de texto, tipos textuales, tipología de textos

Transcreation
Recasting a text in a new form or modifying it to make it suitable for a different purpose, readership, culture, country or region. Many marketing texts and advertisements should be adapted or transcreated when translating to other languages or variants, or they may be rendered useless or damaging. Preferably, advertisements should be translated in the target country with advice from a local advertising agency. Texts with extensive regional or culture-specific jargon must also undergo adaptation or transcreation to avoid misunderstandings.
Synonym: localisation, adaptation. Although some authors consider these three terms as synonymous, others state that adaptation and localisation imply formal changes while the message and context are retained unchanged, while transcreation can imply a change in the context and only retains its essence. The case of Marvel Comics “Spiderman” for the Indian market which featured an Indian born spiderman fighting Rahshasa in the Taj Mahal is a good example of transcreation.
Spanish: transcreación, adaptación, localización

Translation competence
Ability to properly perform the translation of a written text from the source language into the target language. A set of knowledge, skills and behaviours that allow someone to perform properly and adapt to unexpected conditions, creating solutions for translation problems. It implies that there is an inflection point between competence and incompetence, but the difficulty to measure this point has produced the concept “fit for use” (a translation that can perform its intended purpose). Competence in translation, its growth, is directly related to experience and the ability to learn and create solutions through reflection and experience-based intuition.
Spanish: competencias en traducción

Translation
The process of transferring written messages from one language into another in a way those messages were intended by the original author and with a style easily understood by the target readers. The end result or product of this process.
Spanish: traducción

Translation agency
It’s a formal organisation that acts as a middleman between the authors of translations and someone that needs to translate a document (end-client). An agency usually does not have translators in its staff; once it has signed a contract with an end-client under certain agreed conditions, it subcontracts freelancers willing to accept a fixed imposed fee and other conditions, to do the work. These middlemen do offer added-value services when they act as project managers in complex translations, where either the volume or many target languages require managing multiple translators and files, and non-language services like DTP and others are required.
Spanish: agencia de traducción

Translation apprentice
This mainly refers to translators that don't have formal training and experience, as well as trainees and graduates of translation programs.
Spanish: traductor novicio, traductor generalista, traductor aprendiz, aprendiz de traducción

Translation broker
Etymologically this is an agent that charges a commission to translators for finding work for them (this kind of agent does not exist, or is very rare in the translation market), and is usually confused with a translation agency.
Spanish: agente de traductores (Comisionista de traductores)

Translation company
It’s a formal organisation that provides translation services through in-house translators. Sometimes they act as middlemen (translation agencies) by subcontracting work to freelancers. These companies do offer added-value services when they act as project managers in complex translations, where either the volume or many target languages require managing multiple translators and files, and non-language services like DTP and others are required.
Spanish: empresa de traducción

Translation fields
Translation of advertisements; Financial translation ; Business translation; General translation; Legal translation; Literary translation; Medical translation; Technical translation; Environmental translation; and many more.
Spanish: especialidades de traducción

Translation memory
A translation memory (TM) is part of a computer-aided translation software that produces an aggregated list of texts previously translated by a translator; pairs of segments (usually whole sentences) in two languages. When the translation memory scans a new text and recognises a segment similar to one it has in its memory, it offers the partner of that segment in the other language as a possible translation. In this way, identical segments can speed up the translation process by bringing it down to a mere assessment of the adequacy of the translation offered according to the context.
Spanish: memoria de traducción

Translation paraprofessional
A trained worker that is not a translator but assists a professional translator.
Spanish: asistente de traducción

Translation problem
A situation where a target-text element must be sought to correspond in some way to a source-text element and more than one solution is viable. Solutions must be found and decisions made from linguistic, contextual, cultural and stylistic standpoints.
Spanish: problemas de traducción

Translation service provider
(TSP) the person or business that provides translation services (translation, proofreading, reviewing and localisation). Although a legal entity (business) can only be the middleman in the rendering of a service and the true service provider is a person, the term includes businesses that make use of the professional services of others. For this reason some include project management as a language or translation service although it has nothing to do with languages.
Spanish: proveedor de servicios de traducción, traductor

Translation Team
Two or more translators working in parallel in a same project, either to shorten the delivery time of a long text or working in different language pairs. Reviewers and editors working on the same project, and sometimes a Project Manager, are considered part of a team.
Spanish: equipo de traducción

Translation unit
Any piece of text that holds one or more messages that can be translated separately from the rest of the text. It represents the smallest grammatical unit that should be translated as a whole. It can be a full sentence, part of a sentence or a clause, and it can vary depending on context and the translator’s analysis. In CAT tool software, and specially in translation memories, a TU is a bilingual pair of equivalent segments of text inside a translation memory that originate from CAT tool segmentation and the work of the translator.
Spanish: unidad de traducción

Transliteration
Phonetic transcription from one language to another when both languages are very different (i.e. Japanese words written with Latin scripts), very helpful for people who study a language with a different alphabet or script.
Spanish: transcripción fonética

Transposition
Where grammatical categories are changed. For example, on an envelope, the French “Expéditeur:” (sender) is translated with the English “From:”, thus rendering a noun with a preposition.
Spanish: transposición, traducción transpuesta

Typesetting
The composition of text by means of types. At present and together with graphic design it is now part of DTP.
Spanish: composición tipográfica