Unit 3: Translation and Project Management

This unit speaks about of how translation can benefit from project management techniques and quality control processes.

Translation profession is evolving in a service for industry.

Project management:The Basics

Actually, the translation market is increasing its profits. At the same time the working environment of the translator is transforming towards descentralized global teams and technology is the crucial key of the process.

Translation, likes the project management, are unique and temporary, but there is no doubt that exist a pool of previously translated materials provides an invaluable source of knowledge and expertise and thus contributing to the project's efficiency in terms of speed and quality, specially in the sectors of technology publishing.

Translation workflow and Operational

Environment

Translation is an essential part in the information cycle that deals with information obejects (IO).

Translation project's life-cycle:

First step of translation project's lifecycle is commissioning: Here, project manager receives a bid for translating something. He must to define client's needs and evaluate his options in terms of time, cost, quality. This is a Feasibility study.

The next step is planning. In this phase, is very important to concieve the project as a whole. The project manager has to devise a coherent plan where all these items are adequantly coordinated.

The Translation phase is the most important part of the project and is only successful if you have been adequantly planned and completed the rest of the project phases.

Finally, the wind-up stage, is the last step and it consists in to revise the text translated

Unit 1 and unit 2 Summary

Translation concepts and techniques:

We were speaking about the diferent strategies for making a good translation. There are 8 translation techniques.
- Borrowing, taking words straight into another language
- Calque, literal translation at phrase level
- Literal Translation
- Transposition, frequently used between English and Spanish
- Modulation, using a phrase that is diferent in the source and target languages to express the same idea.
- Reformulation, to express something in a diferent way.
- Adaptation, it seems 'reformulation' but the target language used isn't familiar or appropriate to the target languages culture.
- Compesation, the meaning that is lost in the inmediate translation is expressed somewhere else in the Translation Techniques.

Terminology:

Is a polysemous that can be refer to a collection, an activity or an theory.
Two perspectives:
Concept-oriented perspective, a group of concepts of a specialized area and their associated signs.
Term-oriented, the items which are characterized by special reference within a discipline, are the terms of that discipline, and the collectively they form its 'terminology'.


Terminology plays an important role in many different fields such as standardization, translation, technical documentation, and software localization.
There are three basics concepts in terminology:
- Object: Any part of the perceivable or conceivable world
- Concept: A unit of thought constituted throught abstraction on the basis of properties common to a set objects.
- Term: Designation of a defined concept in a special language by a linguistic expression.


Term structure:

Terms can have different types of structures.

Simple terms: Terms consisting of only one stem with or without affixes.
Abbreviated terms: Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms.
Complex terms: terms consisting of two or more stems with or without other term elements
Compound terms: Complex terms in which elements have a fixed position within the terms as a whole but are no linked by morphological devices.

The choice between a single-word or a multiword term depends on languages conventions.

Homonymy and Polysemy:

Homonymy: identical terms representing different concepts have differents etymological origins
Polysemous: When a term gets several meaning

electronic screens as thin as paper are coming soon

Durante años, las pantallas de los portatiles, televisores, telefonos moviles, etc, se han convertido en mas nitidas, grandes y finas. Las pantallas estan cerca de llegar a ser mas delgadas todavia, pero con un nuevo enfoque. Por la utilización de componentes flexibles, estas pantallas tambien se convertiran en flexibles. Algunas incluso podrian ser enrolladas y metidas en tu bolsillo como una pieza de papel electrónico. Estas finas láminas de plástico serán utilizadas para poder ver palabras e imágenes; un libro, o quizás, nuestra revista o periódico. Y ahora parece como si las pantallas pudieran ser producidas en masa, de forma parecida al papel impreso, que ellos estan simulando.
La crucial tecnologia desarollada apareció recientemente en el Flexible Display Centre de Arizona State University. Utilizando un novedoso proceso litografico inventado por HP Labs, el brazo investigador de Hewlett-Packard, y una tinta electrónica producida por E Ink, una compañia creada a partir del Massachusetts Institute of Techonology, los investigadores del centro lograron imprimir muestras flexibles en largos rollos de un plástico de pelicula fabricado por DuPont. Para hacer pantallas individuales, la pelicula impresa es cortada dentro de las secciones como si fueran folios para revistas o periodicos que podrian ser cortados para............
Las pantallas electrophoretic resultantes son de poco peso y consumen solo una fracción de la energia de una tipica pantalla de cristal liquido. Su primera utilización es probablemente por parte de la Armada Americana, quien ayuda a pagar el projecto. Ellos desean que sus soldados sean capaces de utilizar las pantallas como mapas electronicos y recibir la información. La idea es que las pantallas flexibles reemplacen algunos de los voluminosos mecanismos que los soldados ahora tienen que llevar encima. Si esto funciona, el mercado al por menor se acercará. Las primeras pruebas de las versiones para el consumidor podrian empezar dentro de unos años.