- •Lecture 9 Understanding Technical Communication: Specific Features of Technical Communication
- •Specific features of technical documentation
- •Language
- •If the cycling device triggers an alarm, mount the unit in a different location.
- •Example 4: Complex and figurative language
- •Example 5: Vivid imagery in scientific language
- •Example 7: Metaphors in scientific texts
- •Terminology
- •If the cycling device triggers an alarm, mount the unit in a different location.
- •Facts and specifications
- •In a scientific text, we also find hard facts, although the structural and linguistic style of such texts means they are likely to be presented in sentences rather than as bulleted lists.
- •Example 17: References to standards and laws
- •Graphics
- •Typical text types
- •Manuals
- •Applications and proposals
- •Reports and scientific papers
- •Introduction - Materials and methods - Results - Discussion (sometimes referred to as imrad).
- •Presentations
- •Finding texts on the Internet
- •Regulatory documents
- •Popular science
Translation Studies Lecture 9
Understanding Technical Communication
Lecture 9 Understanding Technical Communication: Specific Features of Technical Communication
This lecture looks in greater detail at the different types of texts which are translated by technical translators. By the end of the lecture, you will have learned about the key features of typical scientific and technical texts and how these features affect translation. These factors will include issues relating to language, structure, content and non-verbal features. You'll learn some strategies for identifying various text types and the challenges they pose.
Introduction
In order to translate a text properly, you need to be able to tell what kind of text you are dealing with.
Technical information is ubiquitous and appears in many different places and formats. As a result, it is often difficult to tell exactly what is - and what is not – a technical text. If a technical text is supposed to contain technical information, does that mean that a text that contains other types of information is no longer technical? How do we distinguish between a scientific and a technical text? These are not easy questions to answer with anything other than an "It depends" or "You learn to get a feel for what type of text it is". This is not much use when you are learning how to become a technical translator. While the question of whether a text can be classified as purely technical, purely scientific, or something else really does depend on a number of factors, it is possible to identify certain basic characteristics, which give a good indication of what we are dealing with when presented with a text.
Generally speaking, technical documentation has a number of key characteristics which, although not always exclusive to technical documents, do help us to understand why they are the way they are and how we can translate them. Armed with this information we are in a better position to be able to recognize them in the first place.
Specific features of technical documentation
Identifying the main linguistic, terminological, structural and content-related features of texts
Different types of technical information will be communicated to different people for different purposes. This variety of information shapes the entire nature of individual documents and gives rise to a range of different text types, each of which addresses the particular needs of a particular audience in a particular context. This combination of audience and purpose, which determines the texts we encounter, is referred to by Markel (2001:92) as the "writing situation".
In this section, we will look in more detail at specific characteristics of scientific and technical texts. While the following features could conceivably apply to both scientific and technical texts, they are presented here as general rules of thumb; each category contains features, which are usually typical of scientific or technical texts, or which vary in their implementation depending on whether it is a technical or a scientific text.