Translated science and technique in Slovakia

The Slovak Society of Translators of Scientific and Technical Literature (Slovenskej spolocnosti prekladatelov odbornej literatúry, SSPOL) is a voluntary professional organisation that represents translators of technical, scientific and specialised literature. These professionals use Slovak either as a source or as a target language. Other languages spoken by ethnic minorities living in Slovakia are also considered.

The Slovak translators association was established in 1990. At the moment, it has around 330 members, between translators and interpreters, who translate from and to 27 languages.

For most of SSPOL’s members, translating is a main occupation, particularly when it comes to a variety of scientific and technical fields. The majority of the associates of this translation association have “university degrees in linguistics, law, economics, natural sciences, technical or other subjects”. Many even have academic or scientific titles.

Many of SSPOL’s members work as freelance translators or interpreters, combined with teaching activities at elementary or secondary schools or higher education institutions, translators or editors in publishing houses, journalists, linguists or lexicographers and terminologists in scientific institutions.

Over the past few years, the Slovak organisation – as its members individually – has been committed to establishing partnerships with a number of governmental and international institutions. During many specialised seminars and conferences, either organised entirely or partially by SSPOL, the people responsible for the association have focussed on attempting to deal with “problems in the sphere of the making use of terminological monolingual and translation dictionaries”.

It has been established that one of the aims of SSPOL is to work “systematically on the creation, establishing and unification of specialised terminology, especially in such fields as law and public administration, economics, social security, agriculture, medicine, linguistics” and other subjects.

The people in charge of SSPOL have also decided to “devote attention to the use of computers in translation”.

The executive committee of this Slovak translators association has its headquarters in Bratislava, the country’s capital city, and cooperates regularly with several international organisations, including the Committee of Languages of Limited Diffusion, currently seeded in Bratislava as well.

Available for download, there is a directory of translators of scientific and technical literature, which has been put together by SSPOL.

Keep in mind that Slovak is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages. It is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people. There are also Slovak speakers in emigrant communities in the United States, the Czech Republic and the rest of Europe.

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