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Wilfred Funk said, “The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think and the more ideas you will invite into your mind.”
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You may have seen or heard interpreters at work whispering for heads of state or interpreting in sound-proof booths at large international conferences.
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One of the greatest fallacies when discussing technical translation is to somehow lump it together with scientific translation, or worse still, to use the two terms interchangeably. Throughout the literature on translation, in the frequently brief references to technical translation we see the expression scientific and technical translation, where, out of convenience perhaps, authors see no problem in treating these two siblings as conjoined twins or even as the same person. This fundamental error serves only to confuse the issue because scientific and technical translation are not the same and as such, cannot be compared equally.
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There is a common belief that in order to be a good technical translator, you need to be an expert in a highly specialised field and you can’t specialise in more than one or two subject areas.
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The article was removed by request of the author
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Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
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Like any supplier of goods or services, a translator potentially bears ethical and legal obligations toward his patron or employer. Lately, this has turned out to be of enormous importance with the development of language industry at global scale. For the protection of both parties, standards have been developed that seek to spell out their mutual duties.
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Style doesn’t matter in technical translation. This is, perhaps, one of the more irritating misconceptions for technical translators because it is so completely unfounded and implies that technical translators do not have the same linguistic and writing skills as other types of translator. Perhaps the problem stems from differing opinions of the nature of style and the popular belief that it relates exclusively to literature. If we look at style from a literary point of view, then it does not have any place in technical translation.
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It has been estimated that technical translation accounts for some 90% of the world’s total translation output each year (Kingscott 2002:247). This is unsurprising given the importance attached to the availability of technical information in a variety of languages, motivated partly by the increasingly international focus of many companies and partly as a result of legislation such as Council of the European Union Resolution C411 (1998a), EU Directive 98/37/EC (Council of the European Union 1998b) and Council Directive 93/42/EEC (1993) and international standards such as EN 292-2: 1991 and EN 62079: 2001 to name just a few.
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Technical translation has long been regarded as the ugly duckling of translation, especially in academic circles. Not particularly exciting or attractive and definitely lacking in the glamour and cachet of other types translation, technical translation is often relegated to the bottom division of translation activity and regarded as little more than an exercise in specialised terminology and subject knowledge. Indeed, these factors, particularly subject knowledge, have in some quarters led to technical translation being feared and loathed, like a modern-day barbarian of the linguistic world.
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