VIABILITY OF TERMINOLOGICAL CONSISTENCY IN TRANSLATION OF TECHNICAL TEXTS

Abstract

The paper considers the issues of terminological consistency and inconsistency in both source text and target text comparing the various patterns of term accommodation. As consistency in the selection of terms is generally praised as a key characteristics of professional technical writing, and is acknowledged as one of the benefits of machine translation compared to human translation, in other words, the evasion of synonymy within a text and, respectively, in its translation, is believed to be a communication merit, an attempt to show the ambiguity of this statement has been made. Despite it is obvious that a use of synonyms which is motivated only by stylistic matters, namely the evasion of duplication might be preponderated by matters of clearness in some text genres, text-based research has shown the functionality of synonymy. The research proves the importance of the nature of the source-text inconsistency consideration in any particular text for evaluating translation strategies based upon the discretions and constraints of textuality in the target language, so that both consistent and inconsistent term patterns could be replicated without disrupting the accuracy requirements bearing in mind that the logical possibility of the unmotivated consistent use of a term in a source text is also viable. In this paper, it is claimed that inconsistency in the use of terms, whether in source texts or target texts, otherwise variation, is in some cases textually constrained and hence well motivated. Thus, a shift from a narrow concept of consistency towards motivatedness while selecting terms in technical translation has been suggested. It is certain that the following approach to making translation decisions can be interpreted as a part of translator competence and contradicts with what has been known as a superiority of machine translation and computer-aided translation tools over human translation, specifically the automatic replacement with equivalents.