Bridging the Knowledge Asymmetry between Experts and Laypeople. Translators as Bridge-Builders

Abstract

This paper deals with occupational health and safety, a domain where effective communication between experts and laypeople can con­tribute to saving lives. Expert-lay communication is hampered by the asym­met­ric distribution of knowledge between experts and laypeople. Usually, bridging this gap is a task for technical communicators. However, I argue that translators have the necessary professional competences and are often in a good position to support expert-lay communication. They can address all four dimensions identified by Schubert (2007): specialised content, lin­guis­tic expression, technical medium and working processes. The key com­pe­tences are the translators’ linguistic, translational and specialised knowl­edge. Translators are able to understand the source text and the experts’ in­ten­tions on the one hand, and to anticipate the prior knowledge and ex­pec­ta­tions of the target audience on the other. This allows them to revise texts produced by experts and fine-tune them to the level of knowledge possessed by the intended audience, both interlingually and intralingually. In this way, the workflow to optimise (multilingual) expert-lay communication expands with respect to the workflow in ISO 17100 (2015). In the era of neural ma­chine trans­lation, knowing how to optimise expert-lay communication is an in­her­ent­ly human skill and a potentially added-value service offered by trans­la­tors.