Giovedì, 13 Ottobre 2011 08:21
Translating IT content is no easy task
Kleber Pedroso is an experienced English translator and language coach for Brazilian IT professionals. In his latest guest post for IT Decisions, he comments on the difficulties involved in translating IT-related content into Brazilian Portuguese.
When it comes to translating IT-related content into Brazilian Portuguese, the hardest part is knowing what not to translate. In Brazil, we have incorporated many English terms into daily communication, even when we have a word in Portuguese for that term.
The problem is that, sometimes, we have to translate terms. We do not translate words such as desktop, mouse or mousepad, but we do translate others, such as printer (impressora), computer (computador), keyboard (teclado), and so on. Sometimes, we also have the option of translating a term into Portuguese or not, such as “cloud computing”, which can be kept in English or be translated as “computação em nuvem”…
And… when do we know whether to translate or not, or even, whether we have the option to translate a term or not? Well, the answer is that we don’t know exactly. What I actually mean is that really does not depend on us, translators, as we need to follow what the industry dictates.
For example, when an IT company presents a product or service to the media, it decides how it will be named and commercialized, so we use the name of that product in its original English form or in its Portuguese equivalent, depending on what the company has decided.
A Brazilian IT translator certainly needs to be up to date to what is going on in the IT industry overseas, otherwise he or she will certainly make many mistakes when putting the copy together in Portuguese.
Moreover, translating IT-related content is not the same as translating literature, when you can use your creativity, find equivalent idioms, proverbs or even carefully interpret a passage of a text and translate the idea, as opposed to translating verbatim from the source to the target language. Research and previous IT knowledge is necessary for any technical translation.