You learn a lot by simply pricking up your ears and being a little attentive. I recently tried out new contacts and learned a word at the optician’s: flock. The contact felt a little uncomfortable in my eye, and the optician said that I had some “flock” under the contact and that I should rub my eye a little to get it out. I understood from context that the word must mean “dirt” or “fiber” and looked it up when I got home. According to Dictionary.reference.com the word means “a lock or tuft of wool, hair, cotton, etc.” and it derives from Middle English “flok” and according to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, the Swedish word (and presumably also the English) derives from the ancient Swedish word “flokker”, which means “waste product from wool”. It seems to be an old Swedish word.
All professions have their own special terminology, and we who exercise those professions maybe don’t always think about that those words constitute special terminology. In the translation industry we often talk about “source language” and “target language” without thinking about that those words might not be obvious to other people. The source language is that language which is the translator’s source, i.e. the foreign language that we translate from, in my case English and Spanish. The target language is the language that we translate into and that is the target of the translation, in my case Swedish.
In the translation business we also use quite a few grammatical terms that might feel foreign to those outside the business, but that do not in themselves constitute professional terminology. We do, though, often use translation software that helps us to translate in a more efficient and consistent manner (e.g. Trados, MemoQ, StarTransit) and in connection with these tools there is a wealth of terminology that is specific to the profession and completely unintelligible to those who don’t use these tools themselves.
The most basic terminology is perhaps:
“TM”, which means “translation memory” and is a sort of dictionary that contains previous translations.
“Segment”, which is the part of a text that the translation software separates out and saves in the translation memory. It usually consists of one sentence.
“Fuzzies”, which are matches against the translation memory that are not perfect, but have to be changed by the translator.
“CAT tool” is a collective term for translation tools, where CAT means “Computer Assisted Translation”. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with cats.
We who use special terminology related to our jobs have to remember to be clear about what we mean when we talk to our customers, otherwise there can be misunderstandings. At the same time, the customer might not need to know all the special words and usually does not want a long lecture in terminology, but rather just wants the job to be done and know how much it will cost. That goes for me too when I visit my optician, dentist or perhaps the hardware store. As a translator, through, I’m always happy when people want to explain terminology and how things work. Curiosity can probably be considered a professional requirement for translators.
Finally:
The word “optician” is connected to the Greek οπτικός (optikos), which means “optical” and ωψ (ops), which means “eye”.
These days, eye is called μάτι (mati) as a general word, and οφθαλμός (ophthalmos) as a more clinical term in Modern Greek. From that word, we of course get, “ophthalmology”, which means “the science of the eye”.
The source of that word is (according to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy) οπς- which derives from the Indo-European root oku that we find in the Latin word ”oculus” (eye), and θαλμός which is connected to the Modern Greek words θάλαμος, inner room, bedroom, and θόλος, dome.
Etymology is fun and you can go on and on with it like this. One word leads to the root of the next, and suddenly you realize just how much is connected. For our Indo-European languages the two big languages of influence are of course Latin and Greek. One reason to study extinct languages is exactly this: You learn to see how words are related to each other. More on that some other time.