I’ve known for ages that awareness of terminology is always a prominent issue in professional translating. Some clients can be very prescriptive about the words they want to see in their translated material. And it’s not necessarily always about what you would call “jargon”.
“Modem” is a good example of a jargon word – it’s related to IT and only IT, and everyone knows it (but that’s not to say that everyone who has heard of it has a clear idea of what it is, by a long shot! …by my reckoning, at least). But with one recent professional translation project I did, which had business as its subject matter, I appreciated that “supplier” and “provider” were explicitly among the “words of choice”.
I don’t call these two words “jargon” because “supply” and “provider” are commonly used words in English in connection with all kinds of topics. In the above-mentioned translation project, “provider” was to be understood as one who provides business services online; more specifically, on a website similar to Odesk.com. It’s just that I’m prepared to forgive someone for ending up thinking of a “provider” as someone who supplies work to be done on a site like Odesk.com. It got me thinking: from my personal experience, when one talks about a “supplier” in business matters they usually strictly mean one who supplies stock to a company which sells goods.
And there are other words which look common but are actually to be understood as “terminology” fare sometimes. In another recent project (German to English) I have seen “interne Abhängigkeiten” included in the outlining of technical specifications. Would it be accurate to translate this as “internal dependencies”? Well, I suppose, but I’m so sure that it’s no so much “dependencies” as “factors” in this context; after all, the sensible use one of makes of, say, an object, will depend on its factors – such as its size, or whether or not its resistant to this, that or the other. Wouldn’t you say?