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As the name suggests a Technical Translation Service concerns itself with the business of translating documents or articles that have a technical content – for example user manuals, guides of some kind or texts that convey scientific or technological information.

In order to be considered a competent technical translator not only must he/she have a thorough working knowledge of both the source language and the target language but also have a high level of subject knowledge of the area concerned as well as an understanding of writing conventions and terminology. Technical translation is often described as a mixture of art and science as it often involves the both the linguistic and aesthetic aspects of a language effectively combined.

One recurring feature of technical translation is that it is often formulaic and repetitive in nature – for example where the content has a legal or engineering dimension. As a consequence translators often use some kind of computer assisted translation software known collectively as ‘machine translators’ to help them in their task. They fall into 2 main categories – transfer based and data driven systems.

Transfer based systems are built by linguists and operate by following the grammar and other rules of the source and target language. They are very expensive to develop but form the majority of the commercially available machine translators.

Data driven machine translators work by collecting massive amounts of previously translated bits of information and using these in order to identify matches between the source language and the target language. This method is less expensive to develop but is also generally less accurate. Tests have been conducted on the effectiveness of these various systems and the conclusion seems to be that where machine assisted translation tools are coupled with a degree of human interaction the results are significantly better thus confirming the importance of the role of the technical translator even in this process.

Technical translation is not just about converting one language to another. Just as important are how the cultural features of a language are communicated. Different cultures can exhibit significant differences in the way specific concepts or ideas are communicated. For example a study into a commonly used document ‘The UN Declaration of Human Rights’ showed that when translated into 7 different languages each version although similar in content nevertheless revealed cultural nuances in each case – words such as ‘people’, ‘man’, ‘individual ‘had different levels of importance attached to them relative to other words in the target language and consequently delivered a subtly different message to the reader in each case. Spotting these differences and compensating for them is crucial to the work of any competent translator. Researchers have toyed with the idea of developing a universal writing style in order to tackle this issue but it has been shown to be fraught with problems and probably not realisable.

Others have proposed the use of English as the primary means of communicating amongst multi lingual cultures across the globe – making English the ‘Lingua Franca’ or common world language but this has implications for the field of technical translation. Those translators for whom English is their native tongue have been seen to often adopt a ‘unilateral’ stance when translating to and from English. In other words the English message becomes the main focus of the translation and biases begin to appear in the translation as a result. Another issue concerns the idea of ‘untranslatable’ words. In Chinese for example there are words which have no equivalent in many European languages and can therefore not be translated and even amongst European cultures the same phenomenon can be seen to exist – the German word ‘shadenfreude’ – which means the joy someone may feel at witnessing the misfortune of another, has no equivalent in the English language. When confronted with untranslatable words, one research study suggested that the translators simply avoided using them leading to potential inaccuracies and misinformation in the final text. This could have potentially serious repercussions when translating for example, documents which include a safety or warning component as part of their message.