Last December I gave a talk via the ITI regarding technical translation.
It was quite interesting to see the questions rolling in at the end and I wanted to make a few more comments.
Firstly, I do agree that technical translation is much more subject area intensive than general translation, but actually it could be called “research intensive translation”. If we are looking for features of pure technical translation, I would say we tend to be more literal and we need to do more research. Also we have longer sentences to deal with for the most part.
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There are still quite a lot of people who are planning to move into technical translation which is good to see. Many of them are will have good careers if they focus on skills like the ones I mentioned in the course.