Strategies to Translate Technical Terms

This study aims to investigate the translation strategies employed by amateur translators in translating technical terms of scientific texts. Nowadays a great number of texts that are being translated are scientific ones and scientific translation is considered as a means of communicating scientific findings around the world. Rendering technical terms is the main difficulty of scientific translation especially in the case of amateur translators and we need to see which strategies the translators choose to tackle this problem. For so doing, 6 English sample paragraphs of 160-250 words in the field of chemistry and biology each containing three to five technical terms are translated by 20 under-graduate amateur translators. After collecting the translated paragraphs, the strategies used for translating scientific terms are identified and then classified based on Vinay and Darbelnet (1995/2004) model of direct and oblique translation strategies. The results indicate that direct translation strategies (“borrowing” terms directly from another language and “literal translation”) are the most common ones. The results of this study have awareness raising implications for academicians, researchers and translators.