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This content has been automatically translated. View original in Arabic
20. Sorry, work as a translator!
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Personal page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/EyadQunaibi ===== Account on Twitter https://twitter.com/Dr_EyadQun
The second piece of advice, my dear young friends, is to focus intensely on the scientific terminology related to your field of study, known as terminology. There are key words you must understand with complete precision.
Let me tell you about something that happened to me personally. When I entered the Faculty of Pharmacy, I remember that during my first two years, I spent most of my time translating medical and biological terms. Many of these terms were not originally English but derived from Latin or Greek roots.
At that time, the internet was not widely available, so I had to rely on language dictionaries. I would piece together terms and deduce their meanings, spending a great deal of time on this. I would get frustrated and say to myself, "I’m not a language student—I’m a pharmacy student! It’s unreasonable for me to waste most of my time on translation."
However, I later realized that what I had done was one of the best things I ever did. I built a solid foundation of medical terminology that helped me throughout my studies and career. Years later, I even authored a book called PharmaTerm, short for Pharmaceutical Medical Terminology. When I taught these terms to third- and fourth-year pharmacy students, they would say, "We wish we had understood them this way from our first year!"
The issue isn’t just about terminology specific to your field. You might also have weak English skills, forcing you to rely heavily on translation in your early years to grasp the material. So, bear with the hard work of translation and insist on understanding the core information. Don’t settle for grasping the general meaning from context alone—this will benefit you greatly later, God willing.
Today, things are much easier. With tools like Google, you can take a photo of a page from a book and instantly find the meaning of any word, along with its pronunciation.