Technical Translation: A Study of Interference in Three Persian Translations of “Software Engineering”

Abstract

The present work is a study of technical translation to examine the negative impact of the source text's lexis and syntax on the target text. In this respect, a technical text – a university textbook – and its three Persian translations were investigated. The focus of the study was on the notion of interference in translation which has been less touched in translation studies. The objective was to specify the ways interference affects comprehensibility. Based on Göpferich (2009), comprehensibility encompasses six dimensions from which the dimension of simplicity was scrutinized in this study. The results showed that most cases of lexical interference were due to choosing wrong or meaningless equivalents. They also showed that the extent of lexical interference was higher than that of syntactic interference. The findings will hopefully have some implications for professional translators and translation students in producing more accurate translations. [Source: Authors]