ABSTRACT
The binominal phrase ‘science and technology’ occurs frequently in corpora of news and academic prose (Biber et al. 1999: 1033) and it is perhaps its familiar nature which leads us very readily to use the term ‘scientific and technical translation’. This nomenclature appears to indicate that there is a useful distinction to be made between ‘scientific and technical translation’, commercial translation, ‘legal translation’, etc. At first glance, the topic-based distinction might be regarded as clear-cut. However, in practice, it is not unusual for the term ‘technical translation’ to be used to refer to the translation of texts from domains other than technology/applied science. For some scholars, ‘technical translation’ is synonymous with ‘specialized translation’ or the translation of language for special purposes (LSP), as exemplified by the definition of technical translation offered by Wright and Wright (1993: 1). There is also widespread use of the term ‘pragmatic translation’, introduced by Casagrande (1954: 335) to refer to translation where the purpose is ‘to translate a message as efficiently and as accurately as possible’ and where ‘the emphasis is on the content of the message’ as opposed to its aesthetic or literary form. This topic-independent label is frequently used in relation to translation of text types common in scientific, technical and commercial domains.
