Педагогические науки/2. Проблемы подготовки специалистов

Simkova I. O.

Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences

National Technical University of Ukraine «Kyiv Polytechnic Institute»

Peculiarities of technical translation teaching for future philologists

The rapid social, economic and political changes taking place in Ukraine in recent years (the involvement of Ukraine in the process of globalization in Europe and worldwide signing of the Bologna Declaration, the development of modern technologies, etc.), and led to changes in the education system. In particular, they led to the emergence of a new concept of education, the emergence of new theoretical knowledge in the field of linguistics, philology, pedagogy and psychology of learning as well as new trends in the practical methods of teaching foreign languages.

The middle of the XX century was marked by a change in attitude to the translation as a profession and the beginning of its systematic study. During this period the translations of political, commercial, scientific and technical texts played the main role. In this regard, researchers have become more clearly aware that the main difficulties of translation and the whole nature of the translation process are determined by differences in the structures and rules of the languages involved in this process.

The requirements to the accuracy of the translation were also increased. While technical translation process translators can not be content with fidelity translation "in general" or uniformity of its impact on all participants. Today, technical translation must ensure the transfer of information in every detail, down to values of individual words. Subsequently linguistic primordial translation process became the actual. It was necessary to find out what the linguistic nature of this process is, the extent to which it is determined by the actually linguistic factors, and which factors limiting the accuracy of the information.

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the peculiarities of technical translation teaching for future philologists.

The foreign scientists made a distinction between high school translation teaching and professional translation teaching. They define school translation as the writing of texts “following lexical and syntactic choices induced by the source-language text”, as opposed to professional translation, which is aimed at a reader who is fundamentally interested in the contents of the text. In high school translation teaching the focus is on the language, while in professional translation teaching it is on the content of language. Professional translation can thus be seen as a different level of translation, where linguistic problems, in a strict sense, are a mere side issue. Thus the teaching of translation for professional purposes is also qualitatively different from the use of translation in foreign language teaching [1, p. 22].

It then follows that “translator training starts where foreign language teaching ends” [2, p. 133]. Unfortunately even now in the foreign language departments of higher institutions we can only speak of pedagogical translation in the narrow sense, while the teaching of real translation is the task of translator training programmes, which should be designed for this purpose.

Schäffner [3, p. 131-132] also recognises the difference between translation exercises in language teaching and the teaching of translation for a professional career. She suggests that the concept of translation in the two contexts needs to be defined differently. Translation for foreign language learning is “reproducing the message of the ST while paying attention to different linguistic structures”. This is a kind of decoding-encoding translation. On the other hand, translation for professional purposes involves “text production for specific purposes”, which would entail that in simulated translation attention is focused rather on the function of the text.

An important feature of the present stage of scientific and technological progress is the mutual penetration of the special terminology of some field of knowledge in others, as a result, to translate technical literature, in such field as communications systems, we use industry and telecommunications, radio, microelectronics, computer science, economics and finance, even advertising and marketing dictionaries. About the same set of dictionaries future philologists need today in translation of modern scientific and technical journal like "World of science".

In the twenty-first century increasingly important – and volume, and social significance – have come to occupy a special translation texts – scientific, technical, informational, economic, legal etc. Unlike translation of fiction where the main difficulties for the translator were associated with the task to convey artistic and aesthetic merits of source language (SL), when translating technical texts future philologists deals first of all with language problems. Technical texts can be described as informative or pragmatic, often were anonymous (except scientific articles), more or less standard in form and language tools, so the interpreter in the first place, had to decide purely linguistic problems caused by differences in the structure and semantic characteristics using two languages in the communication process. Therefore, to study such translation teaching problems we use the linguistic methods.

When translating technical literature future philologists should remember that it is characterized by the widespread use of terms. The term is precise and unambiguous definition for the field and therefore requires accuracy in transmission. Therefore, the future translator who has to deal with technical translation must be familiar with the terminology in that area. Scientific and technical literature is also characterized by a clear and logical statement; usually there is no emotional, that is why it allows a large textual proximity to the original.

Initialising since 1961 have been repeated attempts to create a separate discipline – translation of scientific and technical literature. The issue of translating scientific texts allows us to offer the following definition. Translation of technical literature can be seen as an activity that emerged at the intersection of linguistics, on the one hand, and science and technology – on the other. Therefore teaching of technical translation for future philologists should be considered both linguistic and scientific and technical positions, preferring first to study the general speech issues and the second – when considering narrow terminology translation.

As already mentioned, a major role in the success of technical translation plays a substantive knowledge translation in a particular area. The more the translator knows about the relationship of concepts within the system, the stronger will be the association of two tokens with this concept, and hence the significant connections that provide job skills switch. Prerequisite skills of switching will be equally strong relationships with the notion of tokens and a good thematic interpreter training in science and technology.

References:

1. Gile D. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training / D. Gile. Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing, 2009. – 248 p.

2. Klaudy K. Languages in Translation / K. Klaudy. – Budapest: Scholastica, 2003. – 460 p.

3. Schäffner C. Qualification for Professional Translators / C. Schäffner // Translation in Language Teaching Versus Teaching Translation. – In Malmkjær, K. (ed.), 1998. – P. 117-133