{"id":3237,"date":"2019-01-03T05:01:37","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T05:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/?p=3237"},"modified":"2019-03-28T05:59:17","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T05:59:17","slug":"a-lexicon-backstory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/2019\/01\/03\/a-lexicon-backstory\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lexicon Backstory"},"content":{"rendered":"

How transcreating promotional technical journalism gave rise to a different type of Fr-En lexicon<\/h2>\n

by Steve Dyson<\/em><\/p>\n

A French-English Lexicon of Naval Technology<\/a><\/strong> is now freely downloadable. This is the story of how it came into being.<\/p>\n

The beginning<\/h3>\n

First, a few words about myself.<\/p>\n

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\"SteveBorn and raised in Melbourne, Australia, I set out to explore the world after completing a BSc in physics and math. I headed for Paris, France, via Africa, but took two years to get there. Just weeks after arriving, I was buzzing with excitement as I began picking up the language. Soon I had a vague idea that I would like to live in a rural setting while making a living at a desk.<\/p>\n

After an apprenticeship of sorts with an older translator, I chanced upon a satellite engineer looking for a translator who understood French and physics. I freelanced for ten years for CNES, the space agency, and its contractors, then for another decade for satellite imagery specialist Spot Image and its suppliers. Professional ties led to work with a communications specialist who had recently been engaged to raise the international profile of French naval shipbuilding, in part by improving the quality of its marketing materials in English. I soon found the close collaboration\u00beincluding positive and negative feedback\u00bewith these professionals both rewarding and enjoyable.<\/p>\n

Currently a member of Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET<\/a>), I was for many years a member of the SFT in France and the APT in Portugal. Now semi-retired, I continue to work part-time for a handful of clients including Mer et Marine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Awakening<\/h3>\n

Over the 20+ years I spent freelancing for the French space and earth observation industries, the proportion of technical manuals fell while that of technical journalism rose. During that time, I came to the realization that when a French client requested an English translation of an article for a technical magazine, the implicit aim<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 to have a positive impact on a specific readership, usually with a view to future cooperation\u00a0\u2014 was often more important than the explicit instruction, namely to translate (closely) into English.<\/p>\n

At first my efforts to convince clients of the merits of focusing more on implicit aims and less on close translation were not particularly successful. Some clients (often engineers assigned to writing tasks that they felt were beneath them) were offended that an outside translator should have the temerity (one used the word teleguidance<\/em>) to modify their intended meaning. Fortunately, others came around to dialogue and deepening trust. As trust grew, exchanges focused less on the broader issues and more on my queries.<\/p>\n

I was making progress, but the pace was slow until I moved to freelancing for the naval shipbuilding industry and abruptly changed in my area of specialization. I embarked on a reading program to come up to speed with a myriad of new technologies while pursuing long-standing efforts to improve my journalistic style in English. I now see that I had begun to develop a form of transcreation before we had a name for it. On my blog<\/a>, I call it translation by emulation<\/a>; on bills to clients, I call it traduction\/adaptation<\/em>. Some colleagues working for French clients were pushing in much the same direction at the time, including Chris Durban in finance and banking and John Smellie in defense and allied areas. John calls his approach editorial translation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When working for the space and earth observation industries, I compiled simple two-column glossaries (which I later learnt, here<\/a> and here<\/a>, are more correctly termed lexicons), but I found the format less and less suitable as my approach to promotional technical journalism evolved. I studied terminology and its management and tested software before falling back on Microsoft Word as nothing suited my needs better. I explored and wrote about term mining<\/a> using the web and dtSearch<\/a>. All this was in the 1990s. Were I to start over, I might well adopt a different approach.<\/p>\n

So what was the big challenge?<\/h2>\n

Conventional terminology work catalogues tightly defined senses of source language (SL) terms and target-language (TL) equivalents with one-to-one correlations where possible. This works well for source documents written with absolute terminological rigor, tolerably well for source documents written by competent technical writers, less well for other types of writing, and poorly for promotional technical journalism. Why? Because journalists (unlike technical communicators) detest repetition and technical journalists have an exceptionally large bag of tricks to avoid it.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h3>\n

I have written about my terminology work in:<\/p>\n