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message conveyed by a specialized text. As a result, the
relationship between Terminology and Translation is asymmetric
since terminology has no intrinsic need to recur to translation. In
contrast, translation must use terminology as a means to achieve
the interlinguistic transfer of specialized knowledge units.
Translation is a process aimed at facilitating communication
between speakers of different languages. Multilingual
terminological activity supports technical translation. Translation
implies understanding the source text and this requires knowledge
of the specific terms of the source and target languages. This
means, in turn, that technical translators must have some
familiarity with the subject matter they are translating. To do their
job translators depend on bilingual or multilingual vocabularies of
the terms occurring in the text. This does not mean, however, that
translators do not prepare terminology themselves. On occasion
they have to act as terminologists to find equivalents for those
terms that are not listed in the available vocabularies nor in
specialized data banks

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