The effectiveness of targeted subject knowledge in the teaching of scientific translation

A great number of undergraduate and postgraduate translator training programmes include scientific translation among the areas of curricular specialization offered to their students. In these pedagogical settings, trainers are often faced with translation students who have little or no subject knowledge in the field of science. This article sets out to gauge the extent to which reading introductory specialized texts written originally in the target language may help trainee translators to produce accurate translations of scientific texts. To assess the effectiveness of targeted subject knowledge in the teaching of scientific translation, two groups of undergraduate translation students were instructed to translate a passage from a scientific report. While the two groups were allowed to use specialized dictionaries, only one was provided with an introductory target-language article on the same topic prior to translating the text. It was hypothesized that a smaller rate of translation errors by students reading the introductory text would confirm the effectiveness of elementary background knowledge in helping produce accurate translations.