Science Fiction Technologies in Translation: are there lessons to be learned for the translation of space terminology?

摘要

Science fiction writers often have to resort to the creation of new terms to describe the technologies and/or concepts (scientific and otherwise) that they have invented for their works. Such artificially created words may be synthesised from elements of the writer's native language, possibly combined, for effect, with elements from Greek, Latin or other languages.If these works are then translated into another language, the translator is faced with the task of dealing with this new word, for which no directly applicable vocabulary may exist in the destination language. The ways in which the translators of science fiction deal with this dilemma-whether by importing the new term intact, finding acceptable equivalents in the existing vocabulary, or creating a new term in the destination language to replace the untranslatable foreign word- may provide lessons for the space community in tackling the issues surrounding the multilingual translation of space terminology.In this paper, the author will draw upon her experience as an author of reference books pertaining to the Star Wars film series, originally written in English, but later translated into other languages. She will seek to present some of the issues involved in multilingual translation of technical and scientific terminology through the examples of different translations of her own work.