Earlier this year I went to Madrid to take the Institute of Linguists' Diploma in Translation exam. The full exam consists of three papers, which you can either do individually or jointly. I had opted to do all three on one day, so I took with me a small suitcase of bi-lingual Spanish-English dictionaries and other reference books. Among the dictionaries were two large general works - a much-used and very battered Collins and a newer Oxford - and more specialised dictionaries in areas such as business, medicine and science, kindly lent by a colleague. The rules of the exam state that you can consult as many printed dictionaries as you can haul into the room, but access to the Internet is strictly forbidden (while the Internet is a godsend to modern translation and an integral part of most translators' professional lives, there would be obvious dangers of abuse if exam candidates had access to it - you could even put the job out to tender on proz.com).
The three papers comprise a general paper, lasting three hours, and two so-called semi-specialised papers lasting an hour and a half each, where you can choose from one of three different subject areas. I had pretty much decided in advance that I wanted to do the Business and Social Science options, since these are the areas I feel I know most about and the risk of encountering obscure terminology seemed relatively low. It is recommended that candidates take specialised dictionaries for these papers and, fearing the wrath of the translation gods if I failed to make some gesture of propitiation, I duly did.
As things turned out nearly all the dictionaries made the round trip from Cordoba to Madrid without being opened once. I used the big Collins a few times, but the book I used more than any other wasn't a Spanish-English reference book at all. It was an old Penguin copy of Roget's Thesaurus.
The reason a thesaurus is so useful to a translator - in my experience - is that very often one has a general sense of what the writer of the original is trying to express, but one struggles to choose a word that has the right 'flavour' in English. Many, many times I have looked up Spanish words in bi-lingual dictionaries not because I didn't know what the Spanish word meant but because I wanted a better way to translate it than the word that immediately came to mind. This is apt to be frustrating, especially with Latinate words where dictionaries are liable to give just one-word equivalents. Thus if you look up intensificacíon you might get 'intensification', accompanied by a yelp of, 'Well I knew that! Tell me something I don't know for crying out loud!'
This is where a good thesaurus comes into its own. A thesaurus allows you to rummage around at the edges of a word, trying out expressions in your English sentence until you find one that seems to fit. Of course this may force you to recast something else, or replace one part of speech with another, but that is part of the pleasure of the job.
The story has a happy ending, since the Institute of Linguists awarded me a merit in all three papers. Good old Roget.
