Aspectos de la traducción científico-técnica: errores en la traducción de manuales de instrucciones del italiano al inglés.

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to study the problems arising in translating Italian instruction manuals into English. There are just a few studies in this field (most of which employ a textual or terminological approach, working with German texts, such as Ehlich, Noack and Scheiter 1994, Göpferich 1995, Schmitt 1997, Horn-Helf 1999, and Stolze 1999). We have also observed the lack of contrastive studies focused on translation analysis, working with several languages. As a consequence, we decided to compile different examples showing the poor quality of translations into English from Italian. In order to carry out this research, we worked with five different manuals, since we will deal with “ways and forms” (grammatical, syntactic and stylistic aspects).