Working With Science In Spanish Is Different Than You Think
I spent about three years doing technical translations for a biomedical research group before I stopped trying to make English and Spanish sound the same. The short version: they don't. The long version involves a lot of retracted manuscripts and unhappy peer reviewers. Here's what actually works. First, let's get one thing out of the way. Translating science from English to Spanish isn't a word-by-word operation. It's a structural operation. A sentence like "The results were statistically significant, p < 0.05" becomes "Los resultados fueron estadísticamente significativos, p
0,05" — notice the comma instead of the decimal point. That's not a style choice. That's how you write numbers in Spanish. Get this wrong and your paper looks like it was machine-translated, which it probably was if you're cutting corners.
The Actual Process For Science In Spanish
Start by identifying the register. Scientific Spanish has two registers: academic and professional-popular. Academic is what goes in journals. Professional-popular is what goes in press releases, museum exhibits, and government health communications. Mixing them up is the single most common mistake I see. An academic paper won't use "ojalá" or "claro que sí." A press release shouldn't read like a methods section. Know which one you're writing before you write anything. Here's the workflow I actually use now, after burning through two years of bad habits: Step one is reading the source text in its entirety. Not skimming. Reading it. You need to understand the argument, not just the vocabulary. Step two is translating the methods section first. Methods are the least creative part of any paper, and they're also the easiest to mess up because they're full of domain-specific terms that vary by subfield. A biologist says "ensayo" for assay. A chemist says "tub de reacción" for reaction tube. These aren't interchangeable, and your reader will know if you mix them.
Step three is translating the discussion section, which is where the real work happens. This is where you decide whether a concept exists in the Spanish-language literature or whether you need to carry the English term over with an explanation. I've seen translators render "confounding variable" as "variable confusa" in epidemiology papers. It's wrong. The accepted term is "variable de confusión." Getting it wrong makes you look like an amateur, even if the rest of the translation is flawless. I ran into a specific problem last year that took me about four hours to resolve. I was working on a genetics paper that used the term "loss of function" repeatedly. The standard Spanish translation is "pérdida de función," but in the context of that particular gene, the researchers were referring to a specific type of variant classified as "LOF" in ExAC and gnomAD databases. The term "pérdida de función" carried connotations that didn't match what the data actually showed. I ended up keeping "LOF" in parentheses after the first Spanish translation and adding a brief methodological note explaining the classification system. It's not ideal, but it's accurate, and accuracy wins over elegance in peer review every time.
Get the Full Details
Common Mistakes That Will Get Your Work Rejected
False cognates are the beginner trap. "Actual" doesn't mean "actual" in Spanish. It means "current." So "the actual results" translates to "los resultados actuales," which means something entirely different. If you write "los resultados actuales" when you mean "the real results," your reader will think you're talking about recently obtained results, not authentic or true results. The correct translation is "los resultados reales" or "los resultados verdaderos," depending on context. Another mistake is the overuse of the passive voice. English science writing loves the passive. "The sample was heated to 37°C." Spanish science writing prefers the impersonal "se" construction. "Se calentó la muestra a 37°C." Not because the passive is wrong — it's not — but because it sounds stiff and translated. Native Spanish-speaking reviewers will notice. They'll file it under "this wasn't written by someone who works in this field" and that file matters more than you'd expect. Article usage is another minefield. English drops articles before abstract concepts. "The cancer research" becomes "la investigación sobre el cáncer" in Spanish, where the article is required. But "Cancer research has made progress" is just "La investigación sobre el cáncer ha logrado avances." The article is mandatory in Spanish whenever the noun is specific, even in English you'd normally write without one. This trips up translators constantly because the brain wants to preserve the English rhythm, and Spanish doesn't care about your rhythm.
What About Popular Science Writing?
If you're writing science content for a general Spanish-speaking audience — think newsletters, YouTube scripts, Instagram posts — the rules change significantly. You can use more direct address. You can shorten sentences. You can introduce terms gradually rather than defining them immediately. But you still can't be sloppy with terminology. I've seen science communicators use "DNA" and "gen" interchangeably in Spanish articles, as if they mean the same thing. They don't. DNA is ácido desoxirribonucleico. A gene is a segment of that molecule. Conflating them undermines everything else you're trying to communicate. The good news is that the Spanish-speaking scientific community is larger than most people realize. There are journals, preprint servers, and professional associations across Spain and all of Latin America. If you're writing for that audience, you have reference material. Use it. Read recent papers in your field in Spanish. Pay attention to how authors handle terminology, citations, and argument structure. That's more useful than any style guide. The biggest limitation I've found with working in Science In Spanish is the regional variation in technical terminology. A "computer" is "computadora" in Mexico and "ordenador" in Spain. This extends into technical domains. "Server" can be "servidor" everywhere, but "cloud computing" terminology varies. Some terms simply don't have widespread acceptance across all Spanish-speaking regions, and you have to make a deliberate choice about which variety you're writing in. There's no neutral Spanish for technical content. Pick a variety and commit to it, or your readers will spot the inconsistency within a paragraph.
My recommendation for anyone starting out is to find a native-speaking colleague in your field and ask them to flag anything that sounds off. Not for grammar — for style. Grammar is fixable. Style is what makes writing read like it belongs in a particular intellectual tradition. That's much harder to learn from a textbook.
