ENGLISH - SPANISH GLOSSARY OF TRANSLATION INDUSTRY TERMS

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

Native language
Etymologically it refers to the language (or languages) spoken customarily in a country by its citizens. Usually, the native language of a person is the first language learned and dominant since. However many people have different life histories where immersion in other language communities and cultures make it difficult to determine which is their particular native language or if they have more than one, so it is preferable to use the term “dominant language(s)”. In most translation works, it is considered that the native/dominant language of a bilingual person has very little relevancy, instead relevancy is put on language competence, and the requirements of a translation, even if it is not the dominant or primary language of a translator. When translations are targeted to a specific market or readership, the culture and jargon of that readership should be mastered by the translator, usually a native living in that locale (Marketing, Advertising). See Active Languages, Passive Languages.
Spanish: lengua materna

Native-speaker competence
Oral and written command of a language equivalent to that of a person who learned the language as a child and has continued to use it as a language of habitual use.
Spanish: capacidad para hablar como si fuera su lengua materna

Natural translator
People who do translation without having had any training in translation, either formal or informal. This does not refer to their command of languages or to their experience in translation. Usually it is confused with inexperience in translation, bad command of languages and unprofessional behaviour. See professional translators.
Spanish: traductor sin formación

Near-native Proficiency
Knowledge of a second language that allows the user to study or work at the very highest level of professional and academic life and communicate with fluency and sophistication similar to the level of a native speaker (University of Cambridge - Proficiency Exam) or Level C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), including postgraduate and PhD programmes, negotiate and persuade effectively at senior management level in international business settings, understand the main ideas of complex pieces of writing, talk about complex or sensitive issues and write confidently on any subject (University of Cambridge - Proficiency Exam). Only occasional unsystematic inaccuracies, inappropriacies and misunderstandings may occur in unfamiliar situations.
Spanish: capacidad para usar un idioma como si fuera su lengua materna

Neutrality
In the context of translation, it refers to an ethical principle of the profession which establishes that the translator should not let his personal views interfere and modify the messages he must transfer from the source to the target text while translating.
Spanish: imparcialidad

Non-professional translators
Those that don’t fulfill the requirement to be considered a professional translator. See professional translators.
Spanish: traductores aficionados

Non-translation
(NT) Text written originally in the target language that is aligned with a text that must be translated into that target language and used as suggested translation terminology (i.e. contracts, forms templates, etc.)
Spanish: corpus comparable

Oblique translation
It’s a type of translation that includes procedures like transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation. Antonym: Literal translation.
Spanish: traducción oblicua

Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) A software and hardware that can recognize text characters embedded in images and convert these into text which can be edited with a text processor. The efficiency of the conversion can be very variable depending on the quality of the images.
Spanish: reconocimiento óptico de caracteres (OCR)

Parallel corpora
Segments of text in one language are aligned with corresponding segments in another language.
Synonyms: aligned texts, aligned segments, source and target text in two columns, parallel corpora.
Spanish: texto bilingüe en dos columnas, texto bilingüe

Paraprofessional translator
(Aus) An Australian category for a translation apprentice: ”a level of competence in translation for the purpose of producing a translated version of non-specialised information.”
Spanish: traductor novicio, traductor generalista, traductor aprendiz, aprendiz de traducción

Paratranslation
Since all texts have paratexts, all translations logically have “paratranslations”: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers’ jacket copy, interviews, reviews, etc., not created by the translator.
Spanish: paratraducción

Passive languages
The languages a translator or interpreter translates from as source language. See Active Languages, C languages.
Spanish: idiomas pasivos

Per-hour rate
A standard for assessing the cost of a translation that is considered more accurate than cost per word when the amount of work involved doesn’t depend on the amount of words, but on other factors. Used specially for estimating the cost of transcreation, adaptation, reviewing, revising, editing or proofreading, subtitling and dubbing of translations.
Spanish: costo por hora

Per-word rate
A standard for assessing the cost of a translation that is considered more accurate than cost per line of text or per page in many languages. However, as the number of words is not the only measure of the difficulty of a translation job, other variables must be added to the cost of a translation.
Spanish: costo por palabra

Plain English
A form of English that is clear, concise, direct, and natural avoiding the use of jargon and pompous and over-elaborate terms, and with the goal to write in a way that is easily understood. Initially promoted by Orwell in 1946 it has gained much force in an effort to make documents, and specially legal documents, intelligible to the public.
Spanish: lenguaje sencillo, lenguaje ciudadano, lenguaje llano

Post-editing
A misnomer used in the industry to describe the bilingual revision of the output of machine-translation. It should involve a bilingual examination for the existence of errors, specially errors in meaning, inconsistent terminology, untranslated segments and transfer of untranslatables, by comparing the source and target texts, however, as machine translation output is of such low quality it usually involves extensive changes or translating all from scratch.
Spanish: corrección de traducciones automáticas, postedición

Pre-editing
The preparation of the source text prior to an automatic translation process, mainly by the removal of any element or syntax that might confuse the translation machine, replacing them by simple controlled language. In theory it should reduce the need for post-editing. In practice, professional translators reject working double for less pay, so the work is done by unprofessional translators.
Spanish: preedición

Preparation phase
Set of actions the translator undertakes prior to the actual drafting of the translation.
Spanish: fase de preparación

Pre-translation
It consists of the automatic translation of a source text with computer-assisted translation software so that all segments that have 100% matches in the translation memory get allocated.
Spanish: pretraducción

Professional translator
It relates to the many (disagreed) definitions of a “professional”: 1) Someone that demands payment for what he does (although he might do voluntary/pro bono tasks occasionally); 2) Someone that works in an intellectual occupation (against a craft or manual occupation); 3) Someone that follows a set of established rules of professionalism (ethics, quality, service, etc.); 4) Someone that has specialised knowledge and skills that allow him to work in a given profession; 5) Someone that has the knowledge and skills to work in a given profession and has the ability to produce a service “fit for use”; 6) Someone that has a degree in a given profession; 7) Someone that has the knowledge and skills, but for any reason does not work in the profession, but could if he had the opportunity to. As historically, translation was, and still is, a profession passed on informally from experts to apprentices or a self-taught profession, acquiring high standards after years of experience and hard work, the recent irruption of graduates from translation schools (some with doubtful qualifications but good marketing skills in a market highly sensitive to conservative ideas) demanding hierarchy over self-taught professionals, gets much more attention than it reasonably deserves.
Spanish: traductor Profesional

Professionalism
In translation, professionalism is defined on the following subjects: ethics, efficiency, quality and customer service; and summarised as the desire to do one’s job with efficiency according to the superior skills of the profession, at the highest possible level of quality, at the highest standard of ethics and pursuing the highest level of customer satisfaction.
Spanish: profesionalismo

Project Manager
In translation, it is the person in charge of organising the workflow of a translation project in translators groups, agencies and translation companies. This includes assigning tasks to each person which takes part in a project (translators, reviewers, DTP) delivering special requirements, files to be translated and reviewed, and other tasks depending on the type of organisation he works in and on the type of project: one language pair/one translator, big volume/many translators or many language pairs. Freelance translators are their own project managers.
Spanish: Jefe de Proyecto, Encargado de Proyecto, Coordinador de Proyecto

Proofreading
The reading of a proof (typeset version) before printing to detect and correct production-errors of text (typesetting) or art, and compliance with style guide. Term used in translation as an equivalent to reviewing: Reading and correction of a completed monolingual text, usually by someone other than the drafter. See Editing, Copy-editing, Reviewing, Revising.
Spanish: corrección de pruebas