X-Message-Number: 11495 Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 22:04:42 -0800 From: Olaf Henny <> Subject: Technical Dictionaries Message #11476 From: Thomas Donaldson >To Olaf Henny: Have you tried going to a university library (other >libraries would have to be very good to have such things) and getting a >TECHNICAL dictionary of German? If you know German in the first place, >the problem is just that of finding out the corresponding words... which >I'd hardly expect to be in normal German-English dictionaries. But >there are technical dictionaries too; after all, you're hardly the first >person who has wanted to translate technical material. Thank you very much for your concern and advice, Thomas. The use of dictionaries is only safe, if you have already a good concept of what the translation should be, because a word covers a range of meaning, which does often not completely coincide with the range of the word in the other language, which is given as its equivalent in the dictionary. This leads to those often funny and sometimes hilarious signs for English speaking tourists, we find in other countries, which are the result of conscientious use of the dictionary, but somehow miss the mark by a country mile There appears to be relatively little problem with translating technical terms, since most of them are based on Latin. Therefore it is often simply a matter of "Germanizing" the English-Latin form. I.e. vitrification becomes Vitrification. Some expressions are a bit more complicated. Per example for cryopreservation I tried a Netscape search for Kryokonservierung and, bingo, up came not only the confirmation, but also an interesting web-site. The only term, I had initially any difficulty with, is cryoprotectant. Kryoschutztmittel, the straight translation seemed a bit cumbersome, even for German tongues. A bit of digging on the net yielded two terms : Kryoprotektiv and Schutzadditiv. Although I speak German every bit as well as English, since I received all my formal education, even of English, in Germany, cryobiology and modern biochemistry were not a part of it. Therefore using the net to find the proper translation for unknown or doubtful terms has the great advantage, that the sought for words or idioms are set in context. There may be some difficulty for me, if the technical jargon gets imprecise. For example, one of the cryoprotectants mentioned in a German Text is Hydroxyethylstärke (hydroxyethyl starch). If I had to translate this for an information pamphlet to be distributed at a symposium, I would have to ask the original author for the exact molecular formula of the stuff and use that, or if the purpose of the translation was to gleen information from a text on behalf of a client, I would either have to rely on his/her expertise to figure out what exactly it is, or if the term is too imprecise for that, I would have to request clarification from the original author. Best, Olaf Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11495