As a Japanese interpreter in the IT industry, you will certainly encounter many new words and new knowledge during your interpreting process.
In such situations, we need to learn about new knowledge from that new word, and there are many ways to get answers, including: asking knowledgeable people, searching online, searching in books, etc.
Here, I would like to share about “How to search wording on internet”.
- Word searching operations
- Paste the word in the search box of an electronic dictionary page or Google translation to get translation results.
- Paste the word in the search box of Google search to get the context containing that word.
- Criteria for choosing words
- Choose from commonly used results
Example: When looking up the word [取得する] on google translate, you will get many results: get, acquire, obtain, retrieve... So based on the criterion "using common words" I will choose the result [Get], because this word is familiar to readers who are developers.
- Choose words according to context
Example: When searching for the word [周囲], many results will appear such as surroundings, circumference, vicinity, environ, suburbs, perimeter, etc. This word is an uncommon specialized word, so we rely on contextual criteria. Therefore, it is necessary to learn the context of use to choose the correct word. If it is a sentence describing a polygon, you can choose the word [Perimeter], but if it is a sentence describing a circle, you can choose the word [Circumference].
- Choose words in clusters
There are words belonging to a phrase/name that when translated from Japanese to English will have a slight change in the number of words in the result. In this case, you can choose a common phrase that still maintains the meaning.
Example: When you look up the word [項目内容説明], the result will have both [Item description] and [Item content explanation], but I will choose the first phrase which is shorter but still ensures the meaning.
- Others
There are also cases where many pages containing results appear, but each result on each page is different. You can select the results of the page containing content that is talking about a related issue or is similar to the case of the piece of content you are translating.
・Conclusion
Above are a few tips I personally learned during my work. So please refer to the tips above if you find them useful.
※Image and Reference source:
・https://www.freepik.com
・https://translate.google.com