The contribution of terminology to text analysis in specialised translation

Traditionally, terminological products such as glossaries have been used to find suitable equivalents in the coding stage of translation, i.e. in the reformulation of the message in the target language. Developments in terminology have led to the creation of glossaries and terminological data banks which now often include background information on terms. On these grounds, an experiment has been conducted with fourth-year students of the translation course at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori of the University of Trieste to ascertain whether terminological products can also be of service in the preliminary stage of translation, i.e. in message decoding through text analysis. A model of terminological text analysis for the purposes of specialised translation was devised and a group of students was asked to adopt it for the experiment, while a control group of students was given a list of translation equivalents and was allowed to use other reference material. Although further tests are needed to confirm the authors' hypotheses, the results of the experiment suggest that terminological products including background information on terms may partially make up for lack of subject-specific knowledge when conducting text analysis in the preliminary stage of translation of highly specialised texts.