Chapter Five
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meanings. Success or failure will depend mainly on the degree of the
knowledge and expertise translators have on the matter translated, and on
the cultural context in which it occurs. This competence should be
complementary when applied both to the source and the target languages.
In order to understand specialist terms in any field of knowledge (i.e. to
apply correct inferential strategies), specialization and expertise derived
from practice is required. Thus, more or less, abstract knowledge should
materialize in a pragmatic domain (linguistic and cultural), both in the
source and in the target language. We have seen that in the case of
financial metaphors important asymmetries of cognitive and cultural
nature arise between Spanish and English, which demand extensive
adjustments (by the translator), sometimes impossible to attain.
Now, a crucial question must be raised: should financial translators be
also expert financiers? This also brings up other questions, such as: if so,
how much specialized? Is it enough to have had a long experience
translating specialized financial documents, or is an additional academic or
professional training in finance also required? Nobody doubts specialist
translators must have a good knowledge of the fields they translate,
especially today, when knowledge is growing wider and wider,
consequently becoming more and more specialized. These are times
characterized by urgency, times where translation tasks must be performed
as quickly as possible, because communication has accelerated at such a
high pace (thanks to the Internet) that translators must deliver their work in
shorter and shorter time spans. This implies swiftness and urgency in
finishing the translation tasks demanded by the clients, very often at the
expense of quality and precision.
This reality might somehow seem to contradict the need to comply
with the different translation phases that I have referred to in the previous
pages, with the cognitive-inferential one being crucial (although it is only
the starting point or the first hurdle to be cleared). How can translators
spend time digging into the cognitive, linguistic and pragmatic translation
levels if they cannot devote all the time they need for the task? Obviously,
translators cannot face these professional demands with full success. On
the one hand, admitting they are not experienced enough, they need to
manifest some kind of professional specialization in the shortest time
possible if they want to succeed as professional specialist translators. The
crux of the matter is to define what we understand by “specialist”, and
how long it takes to become one. Do we mean just to achieve a certain
level of knowledge and skill in a particular field and devote wholly to
finance translation, or to be able to combine this with other
specializations? This approach is more or less reflected in many university