Glossary-building and dictionary creation are indispensable for large-scale jobs and machine-translation projects. If you have defined this as part of your scope of work, have your translation specialist or agency representative describe how they will implement it.

The key to the successful translation of technical documents, especially on a large scale, is access to a dependable glossary that is faithful to the industry-specific subject matter to be translated. Building this database involves much more than just consulting good technical dictionaries.

Successful glossary-building starts with obtaining and reviewing material with comparable subject matter that has been published abroad, and extrapolating the most contemporary terms used in the target country. By organizing an experienced team of language experts and coordinating their terminology databases, it is possible to produce a better, more intelligible and more accurate translation. As anyone with experience in the translation field can attest, this kind of terminology work is worth its weight in gold.

Next, when a new job is begun, the agency will try to obtain as much of your source documentation as possible and review it for new vocabulary, for company-specific vocabulary and abbreviations and jargon, and for problems and inconsistencies that might complicate the translation process. Steps will be taken to resolve each of these issues, and any other issues that arise, by category. This is done in cooperation with the client, if the right level of contact exists, and by agencies or translators on their own, if not.

Guidelines for translators are then drawn up and distributed, terminology is compared to precedents in the field and subject matter (or is researched to produce new terminology), and more calls are made to contacts at the client company. Then, with a firm terminology foundation, the translation process can begin.

Why so much pre-translation work? Haven't you already paid to have your material documented in English? Well, consider the problem of "polysemy," that is, the embedding of multiple meanings in one word.

In English, the word "switch" conveys all of the following meanings:

• the act of swapping one thing for another;
• the act of replacing one thing by another;
• an appliance "on-off" switch, such as operates a lamp;
• an electronic or mechanical switch of a specific shape, such as a "toggle switch";
• a railroad switch that routes trains from one set of rails to another;
• a thin, tapered, flexible stick, such as the young shoot of a tree;
• an emendation to a computer command line (in DOS, for example, these are always preceded by "/" or "-");
• and, finally, the central routing facility for various subsets of telephone lines.

One word in English, but at least 8 possible meanings. In Spanish, each of these 8 cases of "switch" requires an entirely distinct word or phrase. It is therefore critically important to have a glossary specific to the industry and even to the target country to avoid mistaking a "toggle switch" for a "skinny stick."

Company logos and trademarked slogans are examples of things that cannot be "freely translated," but must be handled with due diligence. If an expression has already been adopted at the corporate level, it is imperative that the translator be informed of this and not permitted to create a new one.

In many cases, a combination of these linguistic issues will come to affect terminology creation. For example, should acronyms and abbreviations be translated, left in English but translated in expansion, or not translated at all (see Time Bombs, above)? Here is where you must rely on the translator's or agency's knowledge of the relative level of linguistic development in the industry-specific field in the specific nation(s) where the document is destined. In Italian, for example, it is common practice to borrow terms directly from English, especially those in the fields of telecommunications and computers. In French, by contrast, this is almost never done.

Consider a situation in which an airplane maintenance manual had to be "neutralized" so as to be entirely intelligible to both its U.S. and U.K. users. It might require a specialized linguistic "conversion chart" to explain to both camps why a new term has been chosen for an old favorite. The manual could explain, for example, that the U.K.-preferred "lift" and the U.S.-preferred "elevator" had been superseded by "raising platform." Such an internationalization of documents makes them culturally and linguistically intelligible all over the globe. The accepted term might sound "artificial," but if it communicates the meaning with the least amount of ambiguity, it is "perfect."

What works in translation is what works for the largest number of users. If those who use the documentation can understand the translation without any linguistic distractions from the content, then the highest objective of technical translation has been achieved. With extremely dense, technical, acronym-filled documents, the only way to accomplish this is through constantly updated on-line lexicons, which a team of organized, supervised translators uses to determine quickly the correct linguistic transfers.