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  

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