ABSTRACTS
Daniel Dejica, Professor and Director of the Politehnica Advanced Center for Translation Studies, Timisoara, Romania
Positioning Technical Translation in the Field of Contemporary Translation Studies
LSP translation is an important component of all undergraduate programs in translation studies. Its importance for didactic or research purposes was highlighted by Kingscott (2002), who claimed that "90% of the translations on the global market are technical translations". In the same vein, the need for research in this field was justified by Byrne (2006), whose claim that "technical translation has been neglected in the literature of translation theory" (Byrne 2006: 1) is a rational impetus for translation researchers and scholars who aim to contribute with their findings to the development of the discipline (Dejica 2020: 56). Supporting these claims, we need to acknowledge that the way in which technical translation is taught, learned, researched, or approached by lecturers, students, researchers, or translators has changed dramatically in the last two or three decades. This presentation will look into the evolution and development of technical translation from a holistic perspective, with the aims of (1) positioning it on the map of contemporary Translation Studies and (2) identifying its main didactic and research priorities.
Dr. István Lengyel, BeLazy, founder and former CEO at memoQ, Barcelona, Spain
Technical translation research: from 'find and replace' to using AI
Software Ate The World, Now AI Is Eating Software. This is a title from Forbes Magazine in 2019. The one AI technology that really impacts translation is called transformers, and is the basis for large language models. The first important research papers here date back to 2014. Needless to say, LLMs were invented by machine translation people!
Since the 1990s translators and reviewers started using software, and an entire industry was built up on the concept of fuzzy matching. TM technology has not changed much since then. Before we ask the question: will translators be needed, we need to ask the question: how could human translators add value in the long run?
People who translate don't understand how LLMs work. People who create such systems don't understand the translation process. Change is inevitable, but both translators and software companies will hold on to their existing processes for long, patching things up rather than rethinking things. We know two things: that translation quality definition and measurement has never been as important as in this race between computer and human, and that (human) translation production research will finally have an economic impact.
In this presentation, I review changes in translation technology since the early 2000s, and give arguments why current translation environment tools may be a dead end. I also help you to start asking some relevant questions.
Dr. Jody Byrne, SAP Ireland, author of Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation (Springer) and Scientific and Technical Translation Explained. A Nuts and Bolts Guide for Beginners (Routledge), Ireland
Technical Translation: Today's technical challenges, tomorrow's opportunities
Technical translation has never existed in a vacuum. It has always formed part of a rich and varied network of people, technology, and cultures. And like most things, it is constantly evolving. Over the decades, changes loomed on the horizon that some feared would mark the beginning of the end for technical translation. Yet despite everything, technical translators are still here, having adapted to meet the various social, commercial, and technical challenges they encountered.
Today, the challenges seem more daunting than ever. With technologies such as Large Language Models and Generative AI promising to do the things we do as technical communicators but faster and more cheaply, it would be easy to fear the worst. Coupled with changing social norms and literacies, some might question whether technical translation even has a future. But the reality is that these challenges actually give us cause for optimism about the future not just of technical translation. but technical communication as a whole.
In this talk, we will explore some examples which appear, at first glance, to suggest challenging times ahead, but which provide a tantalizing glimpse of the future for technical translators and the unexpected and exciting ways in which their role might evolve.
Kirk St.Amant, Professor and the Eunice C. Williamson Chair in Technical Communication at Louisiana Tech University, USA
Technical Writing for Translators: A Cognitive Approach to Creating Usable Content
Individuals often view translation as a matter of converting words from one language to another. This perspective, however, overlooks the psychological, or cognitive, processes involved in communication and can cause problems when technical writers create source texts for translation. In this talk, the speaker will discuss certain cognitive processes affecting communication in general and translation in particular. The speaker will also discuss how such factors affect usability – or the ability of an audience to use a translated text – and what usability issues mean for the success of the related product (and associated companies). The speaker will conclude by presenting strategies translators can use to help technical writers address such cognitive factors in order to create source texts that are easier to translate and thus help with the usability and marketability of related products.
Loredana Pungă, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Letters, University of the West, Timisoara, Romania
What does it take to be a skilled technical translator?
This presentation offers a general review of some of the various insights into translation competences and their associated skills that most translator training programs target. The PACTE holistic translation competence model, the TransComp (Göpferich's) translation competence model and the most recent variant of the EMT competence framework will be discussed, with comments on their relevance for the profile of translators in the science and technology domain. Brief remarks will be made on the reflection of these competence models or frameworks in the ever- and fast-growing translation industry today, from the employers' perspective.
Professor Ramune Kaspere, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
Project management in technical translator training: a skill to get or to forget
Advances in technologies have increasingly benefitted translation project management (Ilieva & Kancheva, 2019). Artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates and enables effective automation of repetitive tasks, thus transforming the ways businesses operate and freeing up human resources for more complicated tasks. It has been contended that AI-driven translation project management systems may soon be proactive, collaborative and, more importantly, operating on autopilot (Doronin, 2019), i.e., without the intervention of a project manager. This presentation aims to discuss and describe the extent to which translation project management skills are essential for technical translators to acquire in the age of AI technologies. We will focus on future prospects within the translation project management field and the imminent consequences for the translators as well as the academia triggered by technological advancement. The views of software developers, users, translation students and translator trainers will be explored.