Translation, Technology, Culture: Remarks on Intercultural Aspects of Technical Translation

Abstract

There is a common misconception that technical documentation is, by definition, clear and hence easy to translate. The terminology is often naively said to be unambiguous and internationally standardized. Even if a term is used in a wrong way, the context will set it right as it eases the understanding and further communication. The article deals with examples which show perfectly how bewildering both specific professional terms and household technical realia might be for native speakers of different languages, which poses a real challenge in translating these apparently “simple” and “unambiguous” units.

References

Schmitt, Peter A. (2015): “Who is afraid of MT?”. Lebende Sprachen. Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 234–250, ISSN (Online) 1868-0267, ISSN (Print) 0023-9909, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/les-2015-0010, October 2015

Yonghui Wu (2016): Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609. 08144v2 [2017.02.05].