INTRODUCING TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGIES INTO AN ALL-UNIVERSITY ELECTIVE COURSE

The paper presents the experience of the Department of Translation Technology and Practice at AKM-WEST (Northern (Arctic) Federal University, Arkhangelsk, Russia) in elaborating and implementing an all-university elective course “Technologies in Technical Translation” which replaced the traditional “Technical Translation” course for students of non-linguistic professional fields (engineering, natural science, humanities, etc.). While teaching translation technologies to students in linguistics has become a widely discussed issue, this approach is new concerning other programs. However, these students can also use some translation tools for their academic and professional development. At the same time, they often have insufficient level of linguistic competence and the habit of using machine translation (MT) inefficiently. They cannot often use search engines and online dictionaries for technical translation purposes correctly. They can hardly evaluate the translation quality or acceptability of an information resource. Thus, these students need a different approach that would give them a better understanding of the technical translation process in general and help them acquire technical skills for using MT engines and CAT systems correctly. The ability of using other computer programs and applications for linguistic purposes also contributes to their professional development. The course consists of three parts: “Technical Translation for Professional Activities”, “Efficient Use of Translation Technology”, and “Technical Translation of Professional Texts”. Special attention is paid to MT. The students can use some MT and CAT-tools with integrated MT. They can try to evaluate the quality of English-Russian MT. The students can observe typical mistakes of MT from English into Russian and try to cope with them. The translation between English and Russian is extremely difficult for the students of non-linguistic professional fields. The linguistic features are distinguished and the lexical composition and grammatical structure of English are often more complicated for these students. The efficiency of this course is evaluated with the help of the enquiries (the questionnaires filled by the students at the beginning and at the end of the course), and the feedback which is encouraged in lectures and practical training. This elective course being an innovation for NArFU, the long-term assessment is also previewed for these students’ further studies.

Keywords: technical translation, translation tools, translation technologies, elective course, translation training