Antivirale Chemotherapie: Ansätze Und Probleme a Study of Translating the Text

Introduction and Analysis

The source text (ST) Antivirale Chemotherapie: Ansätze und Probleme is taken from the scientific journal Biology in unserer Zeit (Biology of our time). It covers new advances in the field of antiviral chemotherapy in particular as a possible treatment of AIDS, whilst also giving the reader a detailed description of how viruses are categorised and how they function.

As stated in the brief the target text (TT) is to appear a similar type of academic publication i.e. "Biology Direct" and will be written in British English although intended for a general English speaking audience.

Therefore the first step was to analyse the text-type of the ST in order to adopt a fitting strategy for translation. This is an expository text with its main purpose being to inform (Hatim and Mason 1990: 153-8). I would further categorize it as being empirical (Higgins et al., 2002: 57-58) as it is a scientific text with its main purpose being to relay a body of facts. As the TT will be aimed at a similar audience to the ST I would aim to maintain the same formal register, include many technical terms. This is where the use of parallel texts become invaluable as it is imperative to have a grasp of the terminology specific to the scientific field(s) in question, in order to render the TT accurate. This is even more important when we consider that the TT will be aimed at an educated audience and not the lay reader therefore mistakes in terminology could make the text confusing and at worst discredit the scientist responsible for undertaking the study/writing the original text. As part of my preparation it was necessary to analyse the ST for lexical and conceptual problems before tackling.

On a lexical scale I had to deal not only with highly specialised SL vocabulary but also terms generally accepted and even expected in certain instances. For example Virusvermehrung;Vermehrung could feasibly relate to multiplication and at first inspection Virus Multiplication seems plausable and fitting in the situation . However after further research it became apparent that this stage in the life cycle of a virus is referred to as replication at an advanced scientific level. That being said when Vermehrung der Bakterien appears I have translated this as bacterial reproduction as bacteria reproduce and do not replicate.

The word Angriffspunkte, is an example of where I have made explicit what was implicit in the original, by the use of launch an antiviral chemotherapy attack. This was justified as made the TT sound more idiomatic and after consulting various literature I found that it was used in current scientific texts as can be demonstrated on the following website : http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/chemo.htm.[accessed 19/02/2009] This is where specialist dictionaries also come into play. However when considering reference material it must be noted the scientific and technical fields are evolving and developing all the time and even the most up to date dictionaries/databases will be slightly out of date. That is why it is so important to have a firm grasp of the wider technical context as well as the textual. In this instance I found Roche http://www.gesundheit.de/roche/ and the books such as Challand & Young, 1997 Antiviral Chemotherapy and Dimmock et al., 2001 Introduction to modern virology provided me with enough of a grounding in the subject area to be able to tackle the text.

Furthermore when conducting research although the internet is an invaluable source of information it is to be noted that not everything found will be credible and this is why I cross referenced all my online research with other websites and also medical journals and reference books. In particular it should be noted that the ST was published in 1989 and many advancements have been made since then, so it is important to bear this in mind when looking at parallel texts as some terms may have changed but it is important the terminology that would have been used when the ST was originally written is adhered to.

I would also like to stress the importance of creating a subject specific glossary before attempting the translation. Finding the terms not only aided with my general knowledge of the