METM24 presentation

Translating botany: not all a bed of roses?

Lynda Hepburn, Edinburgh, UK

Botanists have long avoided translation issues by using Latin as a common language for naming plants; however, this lingua franca is inadequate or inappropriate for many botanical translation tasks. How does the translator go about dealing with common plant names, detailed plant descriptions, and the wide range of situations in which botany crops up in texts for translation? Along with presenting strategies for researching plant nomenclature and describing morphology, this presentation will highlight the linguistic issues of style and register that require consideration in examples of the varied contexts involving translation about plants.

The talk will present some of the common challenges encountered in translating or revising botanical texts, illustrated by examples from the speaker’s own translations of such diverse texts as a field guide to Mediterranean flowers, a book on healing plants, and a tropical plant lexicon. Examples from the German originals will be glossed for non-German speakers. The audience will be encouraged to discover and solve some illustrative examples via interactive polls.

This presentation is intended for those with sufficient knowledge to take on a primarily botanical text but also for the non-botanist and non-scientist who may be confronted by plants popping up in an otherwise unrelated subject area such as tourism, food, history, geography or anything connected with the environment. Attendees will come away with strategies for translating plant-related texts that can also be applied to areas such as zoology and other life sciences.

While a rose by any other name might well smell as sweet, following this presentation you will be confident that the rose in your translation is the correct species or variety, and that the description on the page matches the reality down to the last thorny detail.

About the presenter

Lynda Hepburn originally trained in ecological sciences, working as a field botanist for nature conservation before embarking on a second career as a translator nearly 20 years ago. While translating a varied range of mainly science and technology texts, she is always delighted when a botanical translation project comes along.