Re-thinking the Roles of the Human Translator in the Context of the Technologization of Translation: Technical Writing in Translator Training

This article aims to discuss the place and importance of technical writing in translator training. Drawing on the view that translator training requires to be revised especially considering the new roles the human translator will play in the future as a result of the technological developments in the field of machine translation, the article discusses the results of a learning activity carried out in the “Technical Writing” course offered in the Istanbul 29 Mayıs University Translation Studies undergraduate program. The results of the activity have shown that the students internalized the theoretical knowledge they acquired on technical writing and experienced not only translating a source text but also producing it. It has also been observed that the students realized that a text produced in accordance with the rules of technical writing could be translated more easily. It was also observed that the students developed awareness of the parallelism between the translation process and the technical writing process. Based on the results of the activity, the article suggests that translators who have understood the basics of technical communication and have experience in producing a technical text can be advantageous in terms of employability in workflows that require co-existence of human translators with machines, and incorporation of practices related to technical writing into translator training can contribute to both the field of translation and technical communication. In the article, it has also been proposed that studies for updating translator training should be extended to include new professional activities brought up by machine translation such as training and customization of machine translation systems, pre- and post-editing and machine translation quality control along with technical writing.

Keywords

Translation Studies, Technical Writing, Technical Communication, Human Translator, Machine Translation, Translator Training