Controlled translation: a new teaching scenario tailor-made for the translation industry

Controlled Translation: A New Teaching Scenario Tailor-made for the Translation Industry Enrique Torrejón Celia Rico Dpto. de Traducción e Interpretación Universidad Europea V. de Odón, E-29670 enríque.torrejon@uem.es celia.rico@ti.fil.uem.es Abstract This paper introduces the concept of controlled translation as the new working environment for the professional translator, and advances the idea that a new teaching scenario should emerge to cater for the needs of this controlled environment. In this context, we present how such scenario can be tailor-made to answer the needs of the translation industry. Namely, we concentrate on the introduction of controlled languages techniques to students, on training in pre-editing skills for machine translation use, and on post- editing practice. 1. Introduction The translation industry has dramatically changed over the last ten years as the gradual process of introducing translation memory (TM) and machine translation (MT) systems in the documentation and translation workflow has been gaining momentum. Also, the burgeoning development of the software localization business in an increasingly globalized world presents a significant challenge to the translation industry by multiplying the number of languages that need to be translated and by expecting shorter turnaround time of translations. Online documentation and web delivery call for a responsive translation industry ready to deliver in a highly competitive environment. In this scenario, the use of MT systems in the industry has spawned two additional fields that require careful consideration by the professional translator: the use of controlled languages in specific industries (aeronautics, automotive industry, heavy-equipment manufacturers, software companies, etc.) and the post-editing needs of documents translated with MT systems. Future professional translators need to be aware of issues and skills such as what minimum post-editing entails, which standard metrics are starting to be developed to score machine translation output, which controlled languages are used in the industry, how to write documents in controlled language to get better results when using MT systems, etc. They also need to have a thorough exposure to different professional and online MT systems, not only from the user's viewpoint but also from the developer's since only by a good understanding of the complexity of these systems can the future translator judge the quality of the output and foresee what errors will be frequent. 2. Key Elements in Controlled Translation This triad of use of controlled languages, MT systems and post-editing processes coupled with the ever-increasing use of translation memory, CAT tools, terminology management systems, etc. depict a new working environment for the professional translator that we call Controlled Translation. 2.1. Controlled Languages Controlled languages (CLs) have become 107 more prevalent in the industry in recent years. They are used in technical documentation systems in large corporations since they improve the readability of the documents by imposing clear and direct writing, they reduce syntactic and lexical ambiguities by applying grammatical and lexical constraints, and they also increase the translatability of the text, making it amenable to MT (Mitamura & Nyberg, 1995). The resulting effect is consistency in the style of the documents, the reusability of texts, and …

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