A technical translation refers to the need for specialist translators due to the use of uncommon vocabulary in a text. Topics such as medicine, finance, law, engineering, software, manuals, etc would all be considered as technical. These fields usually contain big amount of specific circumstances or ways to describe situations from the subject and also contain high amount of jargon, words that are used (almost) only within that specific technical field.
Technical translation can also be defined as the translation of technical writing (owner's manuals, user guides, etc.), or more specifically, texts that contain a high degree of technical or specialized terminology, that is, words or phrases that are virtually used only within a specific profession, or describe that profession in great detail. Technical translation covers the translation of many kinds of specialized texts which requires a high level of subject knowledge and mastery of the relevant terminology.
In general, technical translation and language translation contrast in many ways. One of the differences would be the subject of their focus – technical translation focus on easing the understanding of particular jargons used while language translation finds a way to convert the language format into another language format as a whole. Technical translation may use similar language format for the origin language and the target language but concentration would be on the set of language use in understanding the literature. It is also interesting to note that language translation uses text-to-text format while technical translation uses the process of explaining the details if actual equivalent is not available.
As previously defined, translation refers to the process of giving target language equivalent to the language of origin. The same process is being applied in technical translation as the translators attempt to produce actual equivalent or approximate equivalent through explanation of the source language into the target language format.
