Who can translate science?

Translation is very likely more often than not: co-creation. Professional translators will have learned how to quickly adapt to the terminology, phraseology, style of a field, how to invent new terminology, how to perform effective research in cases of doubt and – actually one of the most challenging and frequent problems in translation – how to deal with faulty, ambiguous or badly formulated (stretches of) source texts; but technical expertise is still often required for translation, inside as much as outside of translating science. Many works are translated by (groups of) people with domain knowledge and the necessary linguistic competences, and it is not unusual to have MA or PhD translation students as well as career jumpers from completely different fields than linguistics given a certain background in their languages and cultures of interest.

This provides us with a number of options when it comes to the question of who could translate science: It could be scientists, alone or in groups with complementary domain or language skills; some institutions might even have translation services that can spare at least some time to (aid) translate science; or some stakeholders might have money on the side to commission translation. In all cases, however, the domain knowledge of scientists will be crucial, and should you be in the position to commission a translation, be prepared to answer questions on linguistic and other aspects of the field in question.

Aiding (commissioned) translation / translators

In any case, for a commissioned translation be prepared to act as the domain expert as a scientist. You can aid the linguistic side of a (commissioned) translation if you have some sort of terminology (e.g. any dictionary for your field that you have at hand) at the disposal of those who translate, or if you have a collection of texts (ideally in all languages involved) which you can make available so that term candidates and collocation patterns can be extracted quickly by means of the appropriate tools (see, e.g., on this wiki; professional translators should have acquired access to such tools). If you have commissioned a translation, the use of tools which allow for collaborative work can be a great help, e.g. in order to quickly comment on questions translators might have.