Technical Translation and the Internet

In dealing with technical translation, the Internet has become an inseparable part of a translator's activities, serving both as a translation resource and a translation tool. In this paper, both of the mentioned aspects will be elaborated, from the perspective of technical translation from any of the three official languages spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina into English and vice versa, with a special emphasis on the second aspect, observed through machine translation engines, such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Glosbe Translate, which will be discussed both in terms of their features and regarding the semantical and grammatical accuracy of translation. Prior to that, some of the key concepts regarding the present-time condition of translation, technical translation and computer-assisted translation will be presented in the introductory part. At the end, the conclusions based on the analysis will be made.

I. Translation and Technical Translation

The notion of translation implies a technical and mental activity in which a meaning of a given written textual (discursive) material is “converted” from one language to another. In other words, it presents the activity in which a set of linguistic entities from one language is transferred into an equivalent set in another language. The language to be translated is commonly known as the source language (SL), whereas the language to be translated into is the target language (TL). Taking these terms into account, Catford defines translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)” [1]. On the other hand, Ivir states that the act of translation consists of the “conversion of a message (thought, feeling, wish, order) previously expressed in one language into an equivalent message expressed in another language” [2]. The third definition of translation, given by Stojnić, notices that, in a translation of a text, there is an “obligation to achieve, by means of the language into which it is translated, the meaningful, substantive, and genre-style equivalent of the original, in which the form and content in the language of translation would form the same dialectical unity as the original” [3].