Technical Translation

Technical translations require a high level of knowledge and mastery of subject specific terminology. Any misinterpretation or mistake in the translations of user manuals or guides could lead to a potentially dangerous situation for users. A notable aspect of this type of translation is the precision with which words are used - technical writing has to be exact, direct and to the point, essentially giving a translator the task of producing a perfect word-for-word translation.

Technical translation relates to a wide range of documents spanning all manner of technological and scientific subjects.

What is it?

Material specifications, operating manuals and technical reports are just some of the many documents translated on a frequent basis.

What kind of documents are translated?

What does it involve?

What are the areas of interest? MiningEnergy

MachineryAerospaceElectronics Automotive

ManufacturingOil and Gas Extraction

IT & TelecommunicationsPower Tools and Automation

The Science Behind

Quick Lingo Ltd.

The Importance of a Controlled Translation

What does it involve?Controlled Translation has slowly emerged in the past few years as a new business model which features the use of controlled languages, pre-editing, machine translation, translation memory software, and post-editing processes in order to speed up and standardise the multilingual production of technical documentation.This new model is increasingly being adopted by industries such as telecommunications and software localisation, and offers an excellent framework that meets the translation needs of the automotive industry.

When and why was it introduced?

Controlled languages were first used in the aeronautic industry to tackle the increasing complexity of the aircraft's technical documentation, and since then they have been introduced in other areas such as heavy-equipment machinery.

The automotive industry also followed the path initiated by the aeronautic and heavy-equipment industry: General Motors, for instance, in 1993 started the CASL Project (Controlled Automotive Service Language) for technical documentation; and the Swedish manufacturer Scania also explored the feasibility of defining controlled Swedish for truck maintenance documentation .

What happened next?

Quick Lingo Ltd.

Main benefits:Clear and direct writing

Consistency in the style of the text

Reduction of syntactic and lexical ambiguity

Reusability of the text

And as a direct consequence...A reduction in the cost of authoring and translation processes along with higher customer satisfaction because of better documentation and translation.

The process is divided in three parts:

Pre editing:

Controlled translation:

Post editing:

Translators need to have the skills to adapt text to the Controlled Language guidelines so that the translatability of the source text is improved. Pre-editing guidelines can often be found in the literature of Controlled Languages when grammatical and lexical constraints are described.

By combining the capabilities of Translation Memory software and Machine Translation, productivity is increased and consistency is maintained in all documentation produced.

This is an activity mainly associated with MachineTranslation. Clearly, since MT provides almost 100% accuracy only under certain restricted circumstances (limited vocabulary and grammar, use of a sublanguage), all other output must be post-edited one way or another. Post Editing ranges from browsing to full process depending on translation motivation, i.e. whether it is simply the process of "translating to understand" (inbound translation) or the process of "translating to communicate" (outbound translation).

Quick Lingo Ltd.