A Practical Guide to Scientific and Technical Translation

In the recent past, 30 or 40 years ago, the terms technical and scientific were used interchangeably when discussing about communication, texts, terms, vocabulary or writing. Due mainly to this reason, the lines separating technical and scientific translation became increasingly blurred and little or no distinction was made between the two terms; as such, technical and scientific translation was regarded as one type of LSP translation. Using genre knowledge, in this article we show that technical translation and scientific translation can and should be treated separately, as two distinct types of LSP translation, for both educational and research purposes. We present two genre-based models for setting-up the technical and scientific curricula, aimed at familiarising students with these inter-related, yet different types of LSP translation, and which can also be used as starting points for research in these two fields.

Writing some 15 years ago, the pioneering translation scholar Wolfram Wilss (Wilss 1999: 9) estimated that ‘specialist’ translation accounted for some 80 per cent of the total volume of translation (the other 20 per cent being literary and Bible translation). In a lecture a few years later,1 Geoffrey Kingscott, a leading professional translator, businessman and writer, estimated that over 90 per cent of the world’s translation output was accounted for by ‘technical and commercial translation’. A similar estimate was made by Franco Aixela in the new millennium (2004), in an agenda-setting piece for the launch of JoSTrans. Yet in the scholarly arena, research in ‘non-literary’ translation is said to have lagged behind its literary counterpart (ibid.). So, in addition to investigating when ‘technical and scientific translation came to be a “research field in its own right”’, Franco Aixela estimates that ‘80–90% of the professional demand for translators’ is accounted for by ‘technical translating’, whilst a much lower percentage of publications in Translation Studies2 are concerned with this field (10.2 per cent in the 1990s, rising from 1.4 per cent pre-1950) (2004: 31, 44, 34). The small-scale journal survey reported in Chapter 1 suggests, however, that, some 15 years later, at least in the journals investigated, the balance between research articles concerned with literary or specialised translation may be changing. Nevertheless, that is not to deny that the number of journals devoted to literary issues including literary translation vastly outweighs those dedicated to specialised languages and specialised translation.

Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms. Scientific and Technical Translation focuses on texts that are typically translated in scientific and technical domains, such as technical instructions, data sheets and brochures, patents, scientific research articles and abstracts, popular science press releases and news reports. In seven chapters, this practical textbook: Introduces readers to the typical contexts in which scientific and technical translators work; Shows how corpus resources can be used for terminological and phraseological research; Considers how translation technologies are employed in technical and scientific translation; Explains a range of technical and scientific genres and their translation. Including a wide range of relevant tasks and activities, examples from the most commonly taught language pairs and a glossary of key terms, this is the essential textbook for modules on scientific and technical translation and specialised translation.

Technical translator training and modern technologies
 In the era of the dominance of the language of civilization in the field of science, technical and scientific translation is the first means of civilized interaction. Technical translation deals with texts of a technical nature characterized by a wide use of terminology and complex structures that aspire to approach multiple fields that have augmented with the increase in the need for this medium. Through this article, the researcher highlights the importance of training a technical translator, which never ends, and finally concluded that the proliferation of sources imposes new standards for learning technical translation. Time and place are moving quickly and accurately.

Historically, scientific knowledge has proven to be a mobile form of culture. Translation is what has rendered this knowledge mobile. Scott L. Montgomery, ‘Scientific translation’ This paper looks into the core of scientific and technical translation, with regard to the nature of science and technology texts. The article revises the research opinions on the development of similar and different features of these translation types and highlights the importance of their differentiation, notwithstanding that it is generally convenient to group science and technology together. The research attempts to prove that though scientific translation and technical translation are closely connected domains, they are not identical and the terms ‘scientific’ and ‘technical’ are not interchangeable. Of particular research interest is the studying of scientific translation and technical translation as separate fields within the translation science. The article analyses the existing bibliography maps of translation and Translation Studies, to find out that scientific translation and technical translation have quite recently found their place as distinct fields on the map of translation. However, on the map of Translation Studies, these translation types are not yet present. The assumption for this investigation was that theories of scientific and technical translation, among others, are highly likely to be established within specialized translation and they need a comprehensive methodological research. There is much prospect for these theories to be developed, provided that major recent theoretical works in the field are systematised.

Compared to translation and interpreting studies, which have already had a long-standing tradition, technical writing studies only emerged in the mid-1990s. At that time, so-called translator workbenches, which include several support functions for translators, became state-of-the-art tools. In addition, machine translation (MT) systems were put into operation and led to a change in translator’s daily activities. For example, additional tasks like pre-editing the original texts and post-editing the machine-translated versions have become routine. In addition to actual translation competence, knowledge about how to evaluate and optimise texts, etc., became necessary. Although the original texts to be translated by translators are normally written by technical writers and although the two professions share many common features (Schubert 2007: 103), translators often know very little about the actual work processes of technical writers and vice versa. Now, with the rapidly growing potential influence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are mostly in the form of large language models (LLMs), both professions have to come to terms with the fact that many of their daily activities can now potentially be (semi-)automated through these technologies. These tasks include, among other things, information research, text analysis, text production, correction/editing, terminology work, and ofcourse translation. This article argues for the integration of generative AI in the higher education of both technical writers and technical translators, since it is highly likely that LLMs and other generative AI competences will not only be desired but explicitly requested by potential future employers and clients. Therefore, this article will discuss several examples of what and how universities could teach aspiring technical writers and translators so that they become experts in language-oriented AI.

The problems and requirements for technical translation are characterized. The problems of technical translation as a type of special literature translation are quite broad and include difficulties and problems both with the text itself (lexical, grammatical, stylistic) and with the conditions and results of the translator's work. The prospects for the technical translation development are highlighted. The number of technical translations worldwide is expected to continue to grow as it has been growing since the beginning of the industrial revolution. With the increase in the volume of technical literature translations the demand for technical translators will also increase which makes it possible to predict the main prospects for the technical translation development, in particular, the prospects for the specialists training in this sphere. Taking into account the fact that technical translation is currently not sufficiently researched we can also highlight separate perspectives regarding the development of the science of translation in this aspect.

Purpose of the study. Distance education is one of the possibilities for the successful realization of the didactic potential of information and communication technologies in teaching foreign languages. In the situation of transition of a higher school to a competence-oriented system of education, mastering scientific and technical translation by students of non-linguistic faculties within the framework of an electronic information and educational environment is of particular relevance. The ability to correctly interpret an authentic text testifies not only to sufficient translation training, but also the ability to use electronic educational resources based on the student’s remote access to information referral systems and teaching materials. In this regard, the purpose of this study was to determine the capabilities of remote technologies in teaching scientific and technical translation and assessing the quality of its implementation.Materials and methods. Standardizing the definition of types of semantic distortions on the material of educational translations prepared in the framework of the electronic informational and educational environment of a building university allowed to evaluate the effectiveness of this training format, to develop guidelines for overcoming gaps in the basic interlingua training of future engineers and served as a criterion for evaluating in the process of attestation to master the discipline “Foreign language”. In the process of the study descriptive, comparative, categorical and statistical methods were used.Results. The article describes the modular organization of the electronic information and educational environment in a building university, which implies the inclusion of several interactive platforms in its composition with an indication of their capabilities in teaching scientific and technical translation. The theoretical concepts of understanding the semantic violation in the interlingua text transformation as an unreasonable deviation from the normative requirement of meaningful correspondence of the translation to the original are presented.Comparative analysis allowed us to identify two main categories of translation violations: (I) reducing the accuracy of the semantic content of the text and (II) distorting the semantic content of the original in the form of unjustified omission, addition and replacement. Practical assessment of violations of scientific and technical translation allowed describing the quantitative ratio of categories of errors with a predominance of semantic inaccuracies over semantic distortions, which demonstrates an increased level of formation of students’ linguistic translation competence.Conclusion. The effectiveness of the use of electronic information-educational environment in the daily work of a construction institution has been proved, which allows improving the quality of student learning in the framework of ensuring remote synchronous and asynchronous interaction between participants in the educational process.It was concluded that the future engineering and construction specialists need to focus on choosing the right translation solutions in the process of preparing practical tasks in the electronic information and educational environment.The following guidelines for the effective teaching of translation in non-language faculties in higher education have been developed:denotative correspondence of the translation of engineering and construction texts to the original at the lexical level should be associated with the selection of equivalent units of the translating language reflecting the semantics and mastery of application in the professional sphere;the denotative correspondence of the translation of engineering and construction texts at the syntactic level, understood as the preservation of semantic accents, is determined by the study of various traditions of the communicative progression of the text in English and Russian languages and the establishment of logical links between the syntactic units of the original text;mandatory editing of automated translation is required.

A Practical Guide to Scientific and Technical Translation: Publishing, Style and Terminology. James Brian Alexander Mitchell and Anca Irina Florescu-Mitchell. London: World Scientific; 2022. 200 pages. ISBN 981124314X In a conversational tone and sometimes being repetitive, which shows a fear that the readers do not grasp the real goal of A Practical Guide to Scientific and Technical Translation: Publishing, Style and Terminology or do not understand clearly their advice, James Brian Alexander Mitchell and Anca Irina Florescu-Mitchell use their experiences as researchers, reviewers, proofreaders, and translators to give detailed instructions for writing in English and producing technical and professional translations. Mitchell is a native English speaker who translates from French to English, and Florescu-Mitchell is a non-native English speaker who translates from French to English, English to French, and English/French to Romanian. I write this book review from the point of view of a non-native English speaker who writes my own articles in English and does professional translations from English to Portuguese. The book is divided into 2 parts. The first part, Direct Authoring, is devoted to helping scientists who are non-native speakers of English to write scientific papers. The second part, Technical Translation for Translators, provides guidance for professional translators of technical writing. According to the authors, “direct authoring” is when a non-native speaker, after deciding what to write in their paper, starts to write it directly in English. In this first part of the book, Mitchell and Florescu-Mitchell clarified that their goal is to help scientists to avoid […]

Translation or translating is a communicative activity or dynamic process in which the translator makes great effort to thoroughly comprehend a written message or text in the source language and works very hard to achieve an adequate or an almost identical reproduction in the target language version of the written source language message or text. The role of the knowledge base is essential in both comprehension and reformulation. The extent of knowledge acquisitions in each translation depends on the degree to which the translators knowledge base provides the information or knowledge required to deal with the source-language text. Terminology is where most practical problems lie in technical and scientific translation. Generally speaking, translators knowledge base in terminology is inadequate in comprehension and reformulation of terminology. So knowledge acquisition plays an important role in both the comprehension phase and the reformulation phase. This paper mainly explores significant role of information database as a knowledge acquisition tool in terminology translation, one of the most commonly encountered difficulties during technical translation and meanwhile offers useful suggestions of how to use information database and its search result to refine terminology translation

Contemporary concepts and methods of teaching students scientific and technical translation in an electronic learning environment (Moodle) is highly relevant. The methods of scientific and technical translation teaching in the electronic environment, presented in this article, allow to organize and individualize learning activities of students, in accordance with fields of their future professional activity. They also help form and develop students self-education skills, which are especially important when the classroom work is reduced and the amount of students’ independent work increases. Professionally oriented teaching of scientific and technical translation in an electronic environment is a modular integrated approach, which includes teaching how to work with the terminology of their future professional activity. This approach improves skills of scientific articles reading and writing, drawing up reports and presentations in a foreign language, teaches independent research skills in the framework of a future professional activity. The method of scientific and technical translation teaching in an electronic environment is based on a combination of cognitive, interactive and communicative teaching methods. The training purpose is the development of a future professional personality ready for professional activity, possessing necessary communication skills in his native and foreign language, capable to self-development and self-learning.

This article investigates register shifts in scientific and technical translation, addressing the question of how and to what extent specific features are governed and constrained by register aspects. It examines the translation-relevant items have and be when used as main verbs and their German translation solutions, drawing on a theoretical and methodological framework that takes due account of the context, i.e., the domain(s) underlying the text and reflected in it, and the situation in which the translations fulfill their communicative function in expert-to-expert communication. The data analyzed come from the scientific and technical translation part of the Cologne Specialized Translation Corpus, a high-quality translation corpus designed for translational research. The analysis reveals trends in translation solutions that can be of relevance in translation teaching, professional translation and translation quality assessment. The findings suggest that analyzing register shifts requires translation research to engage with the context, to take account of all textual and extra-textual aspects that trigger specific uses of language in a particular translation. The paper concludes with a call for greater emphasis on the quality of the translation product in corpus compilation, so that researchers may obtain more reliable results and a better understanding of the constrained nature of scientific and technical translation.

In response to the social demand for highly-qualified professionals able to effectively translate texts in different fields of science and technology there must be researched a number of theoretical and practical issues related to future philologists’ professional training. The article analyzes academic publications over the last 15 years, which deal with the problem of developing the scientific and technical translation competence of future Bachelors of Philology. The critical review of research papers, which represent psycholinguistic, linguistic, psychological, didactic and methodological aspects of this problem, is carried out. Within the context of the psycholinguistic aspect, the works of representatives of cognitive linguistics are considered. The research papers, which will help to form the linguistic principles of teaching scientific and technical translation, in particular, to distinguish genres of scientific and technical texts and to carry out their genre-stylistic analysis, are characterized. The publications valuable for constructing a psychological model of a student as an active participant of translation activity are determined. The pedagogical conditions of forming future translators’ professional competence as the key problem considered in didactics academic papers are highlighted. Within the framework of the methodological aspect, the achievements of scientists aimed at determining translation competence and characteristics of its components, the study of the particularities of teaching translation of texts for specific purposes of various genres, as well as the application of information and communication technologies in the process of developing scientific and technical translation competence are analyzed. A range of issues that require a deeper study or improvement are outlined: specifying the content of future philologists’ scientific and technical translation competence; revealing the essence of the term «scientific and technical translation»; generalizing the achievements of representatives of cognitive linguistics to explain the speech-thinking processes of its implementation; defining the typology of scientific and technical texts through the example of the oil and gas industry; characterizing a Philology student as an active participant of translation activity; studying a quasi-professional information and communication environment as future translators’ learning environment.

Information technology has changed the professional environment of scientific and technical translators, who must work with new formats and channels of information. To meet these new challenges, translation teachers must place special emphasis on the importance of the non-textual information evolving around multimedia texts and adopt a more dynamic approach towards audiovisual translation (A VT). In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of graphic information as a new focus for A VT, and present the results of a research project aimed at designing teaching materials for audiovisual, scientific and technical translation. These materials highlight the potential benefits of audiovisual resources for all users in the acquisition of subject field knowledge and terminology and the constraints imposed on translation by visual and acoustic material.

This article tries to show and explain in some detail the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the bibliography on technical and scientific translation throughout history as compared with other research fields. The underlying corpus drawn on are the more than 20,000 entries collected in BITRA (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation) up to September 2003. This bibliographical tool is an online multilingual database which attempts to comprise everything ever published on translation and can be freely accessed on http://www.ua.es/dfing/tra_int/bitra_en.htm The paper concludes that concern for technical and scientific translation only appears in the 1950s, when obsession with canonicity seems to decline somewhat within Translation Studies. A further finding is that consideration of this type of translation has been and remains mainly practical, with reflections on problems posed by terminological domains (mostly legal and, lagging far behind, medical, business and IT), teaching, documentation, the interpreting of technical discourse and professional issues as the favourite topics.