ABSTRACT

Translation cannot be understood without technology, nor technology without translation (Byrne 2012: 3-4). According to Biau and Pym (2006: 18), ‘virtually all translating is aided by computers’, and it is widely acknowledged that technological change – for example the widespread use of translation blogs, wikis, open-code translation software, crowdsourcing, machine translation (MT), translation memory (TM), cloud-based translation tools, corpora, etc. – has influenced the way in which both professional and trainee translators work. In some cases, translation technologies are implicated in workflows in which translators become just another link in a long chain of intermediaries and they translate fragments of texts, rather than whole texts. In Biau and Pym’s (2006: 6) words: ‘Translation, like general text production, becomes more like work with databases, glossaries, and a set of electronic tools, rather than on complete definitive source texts.’ A fact that has not changed however, is that translators spend more than half of their translation time consulting reference works (Varantola 1998; Durán Muñoz 2010, 2011). That said, translators use resources that are not specifically designed for them (Durán Muñoz 2011: 138).1 This may lead to high ‘lexicographic information costs’, with translators investing a great deal of effort in searching for and comprehending lexicographic information and obtaining little or nothing in return (Nielsen 2008).