Sloppy Technical Translation May Cause Accidents

Perhaps it is safe to say that technical translation affects and helps us regulate our lives more than we are aware of it. When we buy a new home appliance, or a new mobile phone that comes with more advanced features than we can “digest” in one sitting, the product guide or user manual that comes with the product must have had undergone through the technical translation process.

This is especially true, of course, with products manufactured in countries that do not speak your language. For example, you may be an American living in suburbia, but the new LCD TV you have bought may have come from as far as Japan, and without a proper translation of the LCD TV’s user manual from Japanese to US English, you would have been at a loss as to how to refine the TV’s controls or adjust them according to your preferences.

On the other hand, if you are a company that manufactures certain goods to be exported in a non-English speaking country, you are also required to make sure that all documents accompanying your product have been properly translated into the destination language.

To put it simply, any document that contains specialized text or complicated procedural information is considered technical, and it requires not just any professional translator, but someone with sector-specific expertise in technical translation. What we mean by “sector specific” is that the translator’s experience and knowledge should closely match the nature of the document that is needed to be translated.

For example, if the document is a product manual of a new kind of medical imaging equipment, the technical translator assigned to work on this document should have had ample experience in the medical equipment field. He or she must have had accomplished past translation jobs in the said field, and he or she must have had receive related certifications from certain organizations.

The importance of technical translation can be understood in how inaccuracy in the translation of technical documents may cause accidents. At the very least, in the hands of an unintentionally misinformed end user, the product might malfunction or break due to inappropriate usage. And we are not just limited to the home situation: as technical documents are used extensively in all possible fields of modern human endeavor, one cannot emphasize more the absolute importance of ensuring nothing less than a perfectly translated technical document.

Aside from accuracy, consideration must also be given to cultural or linguistic nuances. Although technical translation deals with technical terms, with words functioning as if they were also gears of a machine, the document is written by people, and is intended to be read by people. However, two parties coming from two different cultures might arrive at different levels of understanding of what may look like a single unambiguous sentence.

Moreover, technical translation should not be devoid of linguistic aesthetics. Sure, we are dealing with technical terms that are mostly instructions on how to operate something, but it is still the job of the technical translator to make sure that the translated document should resemble something that a human being has written. After all, translation, as they love to say, is both science and art.

By: clacandazo

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Charlene Lacandazo is a marketing executive for Rosetta Translation, one of the leading translation agencies in London, UK. Rosetta Translation specialises in technical translation such as IT translations worldwide.