From Traditional Translation To Modern Translation

With the advancement of information technology and the popularity of Internet, multi-language network has become the platform where people tend to communicate with each other. Under such a circumstance of mushrooming information, traditional manual translation has already been not able to satisfy the demand of translation. Thus, translation technology is applied in translation. Nowadays, computer and some translation tools, like online translation software and terminology, are playing a necessary role in translation. To make the significance of translation technology known to more people, the paper will introduce what is translation technology and define traditional translation and modern translation. It is said that traditional translation refers to the translation before the appearance of personal computer (PC), while modern translation refers to the translation after it. Based on the literature review it will analyze the difference between traditional translation and modern translation in the respect of translation technology. The comparison ranges from source texts (types of source texts and source texts transmission), texts processing (Microsoft Word, OCR technology and PDF software), translation tools (translation memories, terminology, parallel corpus and localization tools), translation workbench (network translation workbench) to the status of translators and machine in translation. From these comparisons, it will highlight the important role of translation technology in translation. Finally, it will explore the applicable domain of translation technology by the case study. The case is mainly conducted through the comparison of human translation and fully automatic translation, and of human translation and computer-assisted translation to analyze what kind of domain is best-suited for translation technology and what are the characteristics of the applicative texts and so on.