DOI: 10.4312/elope.10.2.149-165
Nataša Hirci
Department of Translation Studies Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Changing Trends in the Use of Translation Resources: he Case of Trainee Translators in Slovenia
Summary
his paper explores the changes detected in the utilization of translation resources1 by trainee translators working with the Slovene-English language pair in Slovenia. To test the assumption that rapid advances in information and communication technologies have made a significant impact on translation practice, a study involving two generations of translation students in Ljubljana was designed to examine whether their practice of using translation aids has changed over a certain period of time. his population will soon have to compete with their professional counterparts; it is therefore crucial they are fully equipped not only with the necessary translation knowledge, but also that they are skilled in advanced translation aids, as this will cater for the demands of the modern translation market where an efficient use of translation resources appears to be vital for successful intercultural communication. he results of the study indicate some changes can be detected even within a short period of time.
Key words: trainee translators, translation resources, translation technologies
Novi časi, nove navade: bodoči slovenski prevajalci in raba prevajalskih virov
Povzetek
Članek ponuja vpogled v raziskavo o vplivu tehnoloških sprememb na rabo prevajalskih tehnologij in virov informacij med bodočimi prevajalci v Sloveniji, ki se ukvarjajo s prevajanjem slovenskega in angleškega jezika. Predpostavko, da izredno hiter razmah novih informacijskih in komunikacijskih tehnologij v veliki meri vpliva na prevajalsko prakso in je zato nujno slediti tehnološkemu napredku tudi na prevajalskem področju smo preverjali v raziskavi, v kateri sta bili vključeni dve generaciji študentov prevajalstva Filozofske fakultete v Ljubljani. Študenti prevajalstva bodo namreč kmalu postali ključni igralci na prevajalskem trgu, kjer bodo morali tekmovati s svojimi profesionalnimi prevajalskimi kolegi. Za uspešen prodor bodočih prevajalcev na prevajalski trg in njihovo uspešno medkulturno komunikacijo se zdi nujno usvojiti ne le prevajalske kompetence, temveč je predpogoj tudi dobro poznavanje novih prevajalskih tehnologij in njihova uspešna aplikacija na prevajalsko delo. Rezultati raziskave kažejo, da je možno zaznati vpliv tehnoloških sprememb na prevajalsko prakso v že zelo kratkem času.
Ključne besede: bodoči prevajalci, prevajalski viri, prevajalske tehnologije
E.
1 Translation resources is used throughout this paper: these include both languages resources such as dictionaries and glossaries, as well as other reference resources available not only on paper, but also electronically and on the Internet.
UDK 378.147:81'25:81'322.4(497.4)
TRANSLATION STUDIES 149
Changing Trends in the Use ol^ Translation Resources: he Case of Trainee Translators in Slovenia
1. Introduction
We live at a time when getting an e-mail from an internationally renowned publisher, inviting you to take part in an electronic survey on how digital you are with a chance to win an iPad is quite ordinary. his is the time of international globalisation and the EU integration processes when there seems to be an ever-increasing demand for interlingual and intercultural communication. In response to the needs of the translation market, where a significant predominance of texts is produced in English, translators have to provide a wide array of translations into and out of this language. In the age of rapid changes in the information and communication technologies we can no longer imagine undertaking translation work without the use of electronic translation tools and information resources (cf. Austermühl 2001; Hirci 2003, 2007; Fišer 2005; Vienne 2000; Vintar 1999, 2008). hese changes have actually made a profound impact on every aspect of the information society, as we can no longer picture our lives and our daily functioning without the existence of computers, the Internet and e-mail accounts, while texting on the phone and chatting online are considered part of the daily routine for most of the Western population. Just a few decades ago a typewriter was the main translation tool and a stereotypical image of an overworked translator sitting at a desk full of paper dictionaries and encyclopaedias was fairly true to reality. Today, however, a much more realistic picture of a professional translator at work will portray someone working on a computer with a number of dictionary icons and other electronic applications on a computer screen, with an Internet connection constantly switched on, and most likely a Trades^ bar or other translation software tools active at the same time. Now it seems vital for any translator to be in possession of the necessary computer skills (cf. the EMT guidelines2 on essential competences required from translators), while an efficient utilization of translation tools and information resources appears to be a must for successful intercultural communication.
Since changes in the ICT3 world can be observed almost daily, we wanted to explore what impact such changes might have on a regular translation practice of trainee translators and how quickly these changes can be detected. Our study was driven by the incentive that taking a deeper look at the digital world of this target group might help us discover whether the practice of applying electronic translation resources during translation work undertaken by translation students in Slovenia has changed in any way over the past few years. Such changes will, in fact, need to be reflected in the designing of future translation studies curricula, since this population will soon become actively engaged in professional translation work and will have to compete with other professional translators. It can be argued that it is quite crucial for trainee translators to be trained properly; at the end of their studies they need to be in possession of both the necessary translation competence and translation knowledge, as well as skilled in using translation and information technologies. his paper examines translation practice among trainee translators who are working with the Slovene-English language pair and who constantly need to rely on various aids to verify their translation choices in the foreign language - especially when translating out of Slovene, their first language or L1._
1	SDL Trados is a leading translation desktop products and software provider.
2	For more details on the EMT see http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/programmes/emt/index en.htm
3	ICT stands for the Information and Communication Technologies.
2. Translation resources past and present
Can translators who are not fully computer—literate still successfully compete on the translation market of today? he most likely answer to this question is probably a plain no, keeping in mind that over the past few decades communication in our society has undergone some serious technological changes and life without computers and various hi—tech gadgets is simply unimaginable. What used to be a common everyday translation practice in the past is now, in the digital age of rapid ICT developments and technological breakthroughs, considered highly outdated and time-consuming, if not completely inefficient. Translators working with tons of paper dictionaries and encyclopaedias are a thing of the past and hi-tech equipment, combined with advanced computer skills, have become indispensable for any translator wishing to be a major player competing successfully on the translation market. he next section of the paper is therefore dedicated to a brief discussion on different types of translation resources.
2.1 Traditional paper resources and modern translation aids
Even in the not so distant past, perhaps just a couple of decades ago, translation resources most frequently used during translation work usually comprised paper dictionaries and other reference materials in a paper format. An attempt is made here to provide a brief list of what might still be considered as traditional translation resources for the Slovene-English language pair:
■	monolingual dictionaries and other reference materials (for example Slovene monolingual dictionaries such as SSKJ, Besedišče, Odzadnji slovar, Slovenski pravopis, Slovar tujk,'4 and English monolingual reference dictionaries by various publishing companies such as Collins Cobuild, Longman, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Merriam-Webster, Random House and similar), various dictionaries of collocations (for instance the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English), and grammar books,
■	bi- and multilingual dictionaries (such as Veliki angleško-slovenski slovar and Slovensko-angleškislovar, i.e. the English-Slovene and Slovene-English bilingual dictionary respectively, possibly also specialised dictionaries such as the Slovene-English Dictionary of Legal Terms or the English-Slovene and Slovene-English Business Dictionary to name but a few),
■	specialised glossaries and encyclopaedias,
■	various parallel texts.
hese are still used by translators working with the Slovene-English language pair (for more on the different types of translation aids in Slovenia see also Hirci 2003, 2009; Fišer 2005, 2008; Gorjanc 2005; Mikolič 2009; Pisanski Peterlin 2003; Vintar 2008).
However, an updated, modernised version of the above list of aids constituting an essential part of professional translation practice today would most likely also include translation and information resources such as (cf. Figure 1):
■	electronic mono- and multilingual dictionaries, encyclopaedias and similar reference language resources (for example CDs with SSKJ, Slovene-English bilingual dictionary, English-Slovene bilingual dictionary, Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner's
4 SSKJ stands for the Dictionary of Standard Slovene, followed by various monolingual reference dictionaries for Slovene, the
Slovene Orthography Dictionary and the Dictionary of Words of Foreign Origin.
Figure 1. Basic division of translation aids into dictionaries and other reference aids.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, dictionaries of collocations, other specialised dictionaries and encyclopaedias, even resources on I-phones or smartphones),
■	the Internet, through various search engines, which can be considered the largest online 'library', providing an enormous source of different types of information; in addition to various online dictionaries (one such example is a vast collection of hyperlinks to various dictionaries for the Slovene-English language pair available freely at <http://evroterm.gov.si/ slovar/>), terminology websites (cf. the InterActive Terminology for Europe database for the EU terminology),5 glossaries and encyclopaedias, it also gives insight into a vast array of parallel texts,
■	other online tools and resources, such as mono- and multilingual corpora, which can provide a complex linguistic search through these texts with the help of concordancers and other search options (the British National Corpus or BNC6 and the Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA7 for English, FidaPlus8 for Slovene, or Evrokorpus"9 for the Slovene-English EU documentation for example),
■	computer-assisted translation software programmes with translation memories (such as Translator's Workbench by SDL Trados or Atril's DejaVu110 for instance),
■	and machine-translation programmes (such as Systran"^ for the needs of the EU, and various others used by large multinational corporations).
As mentioned in the previous section of the paper, the main point of interest when designing this study was to determine which of these translation aids are actually used by trainee translators at the Department of Translation Studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the next few sections the experiment design is presented first, followed by the presentation of the results of the questionnaires given to trainee translators._
5	he lATE database is available at http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/SearchByQueryLoad.do?method=load.
6	BNC is available at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.
7	COCA is available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
8	FidaPlus is available at http://www.fidaplus.net/.
9	Evrokorpus is available at http://evrokorpus.gov.si/.
10	More details on these software providers available at http://www.trados.com/en/ and http://www.atril.com/en.
11	More on Systran is available at http://www.systran.co.uk/.
3. Experiment design
he results presented in this paper are drawn from a comparative study on the utilization of various translation tools and information resources by two generations of trainee translators in Slovenia from two different periods, 2005 and 2012. he data for 2005 is part of a wider study (cf. Hirci 2007, 2012) which was designed to look at translations from Slovene into English undertaken by two ten-member groups of translation undergraduates from Year 3 at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. All participants in the study took the same translation courses where they became familiar with various translation aids and were taught how to apply such resources to their translation work as part of their studies. One of the aims of this study was to gain an insight into the attitude held by trainee translators towards the application of various translation aids during their translation work. We wanted to establish whether they work primarily with traditional paper resources or prefer using modern electronic tools and resources, which aids they use most frequently and which they consider most useful when undertaking a translation task. he respondents, who were commissioned a Slovene to English translation, were allowed to make their own list of required paper resources and selected the following:
■	SSKJ, i.e., Dictionary of Standard Slovene,
■	SL-EN bilingual dictionary,
■	EN-SL bilingual dictionary,
■	Collins Cobuild Dictionary of English Language,
■	Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary,
■	English Advanced Learner's Dictionary,
ure,
■	Essential Activator,
■	Oxford Pictorial Dictionary,
■	LTP Oxford Dictionary of Selected Collocations,
■	he BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English,
■	Collins Cobuild hesaurus of English Language,
■	Random House hesaurus: a Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms,
■	Roget's hesaurus,
■	Phrases & Sayings,
■	Pears' encyclopaedia,
■	and Swan's Practical English Usage^^.
More details on the results obtained from the questionnaire assessing respondents' views on their translation practice are provided in the next section of the paper. An updated version of the questionnaire from 2005 was then designed in 2012 to detect possible changing trends in the utilization
12 Detailed references for these resources are provided in the Bibliography section.
of translation resources by another generation of trainee translators. he twenty respondents who took part in the second study seven years later were also undergraduate translation students from Year
3.	hese participants had similar background knowledge on translation aids and their utilisation in translation work. he studies from 2005 and 2012 focused on two main questions:
■	Which translation aids and information resources are considered most useful?
■	Which translation resources are used most frequently during translation work?
In addition, the questionnaire revolved around various issues concerning the conviction generally held by trainee translators that electronic translation tools and information resources are indispensable during their translation work, and that such aids undoubtedly have a positive impact not only on their speed of translating, but also on the quality of their final output. A number of queries were posed to the participants on their attitude towards the paper and electronic resources, the use of the Internet and online corpora, as well as CAT and MT13.
4.	Presentation of results
his part of the paper reports on the results from the questionnaires of 2005 and 2012 to show the changes detected in the application of translation aids. A comparison of the data from the two chosen periods is made to illustrate the changing trends in the utilization of such aids by trainee translators over the past seven years. It ought to be added at this point, however, that the responses given reflect the participants' subjective views on their translation practices and a follow-up study would be necessary to provide further validation of the data ofl^ering a platform for a more objective interpretation and possible generalisation of the results.
Figure 2. Translation resources used by trainee translators in 2005.
A - bilingual dictionaries (SL-EN, EN-SL)
B - monolingual dictionaries (English, SSKJ)
C - parallel texts (e.g., on tourism)
D - other
As evident from Figure 2, in 2005 all 20 trainee translators reported consulting both bilingual and monolingual paper as well as electronic dictionaries during their translation work; 12 respondents reported using parallel texts on a given topic, i.e., books with similar text types, and 7 using dictionaries of collocations such as the BBI, as reported under the section other.
13 CAT stands for computer-assisted translation software, while MT stands for machine translation. 154 Nataša Hirci Changing Trends in the Use of Translation Resources: he Case of Trainee Translators in Slovenia
A - bilingual dictionaries (SL-EN, EN-SL)
B - monolingual dictionaries (English, SSKJ)
C - parallel texts
D - other
Figure 3. Translation resources used by trainee translators in 2012.
Figure 3 is an illustration of how translation practice has changed since 2005. In 2012, 20 responses by trainee translators for bilingual, followed by 15 for monolingual, dictionaries indicate that the participants use the latter somewhat less frequently; still, the main shift can be noted in the use of the medium, as they now seem to be using electronic versions almost exclusively (as participants reported under the section other). In addition, 12 respondents regularly consult vast collections of texts offered in corpora such as the COCA and BNC,14 and parallel texts found with the Google search engine. his, in fact, is the most striking difference observed in translation practice in 2012 compared to the data from 2005. Resources in paper format seem to be increasingly replaced by resources in electronic form, as only 3 participants reported using both paper and electronic aids, while all the rest used only those resources which can be accessed electronically.
In 2005, 6 respondents were convinced that electronic resources influence their speed of translating quite considerably, while another 11 responded that such aids influence their translation speed only slightly; 3 participants believed their speed would remain the same with or without the use of electronic resources. he main difference in translation practice is illustrated in the responses from 2012: an increase from 6 in 2005 to 18 in 2012 signifies trainee translators irmly believe their translation soeed is heavily influenced by the use of electronic resources.
A - dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopaedias - in electronic form
B - the Internet (parallel texts) C - corpora (monolingual, bilingual)
D - e-mail (friends, translator forums (Slovene, international)) E - TR technologies (translation memories with similar texts) F - mobile phones G - other
Figure 4. Electronic resources used while translating in 2005.
COCA - the Corpus of Contemporary American, BNC- the British National Corpus.
14
Figure 4 shows responses from 2005 on which electronic resources, in addition to their paper counterparts, they most frequently consult for translation solutions. Almost all participants answered they use electronic dictionaries and the Internet, while 12 out of 20 stated they also check the usage in monolingual and bilingual online corpora. Seven participants believe that e—mail and translator forums can also be useful, while 9 responded they also use mobile phones to consult their knowledgeable friends or experts in the field. Only 2 reported using CAT programmes with translation memories.
A - dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopaedias - in electronic form
B - the Internet (parallel texts) C - corpora (monolingual,
bilingual)
D - e-mail (friends, translator forums (Slovene, international)) E - TR technologies (translation memories with similar texts) F - mobile phones G - other
Figure 5. Electronic resources used while translating in 2012
Data in Figure 5 is somewhat similar to Figure 4, showing responses for 2012. All respondents reported using only electronic dictionaries, online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia and britannica, and the Internet for parallel texts, while 18 out of 20 were convinced monolingual and bilingual online corpora are also useful. Seven responded they also use e-mail and consult translator forums, while 4 reported using CAT software. his time no responses were given on the use of the mobile phones.
2005
2012
A - dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopaedias - in electronic form B - the Internet (parallel texts) C - corpora (monohngual, bihngual)
D - e-mail (friends, translator forums (Slovene, international))
E - TR technologies (translation memories with similar texts) F - mobile phones G - other
Figure 6.: Most useful sources of information.
in 2005
in 2012
Figure 7. Translation resources used most frequently.
E. \
When answering the question on which sources of information they find most useful during their translation work, just under 30% of respondents in 2005, as illustrated in the pie chart on the left, stated they find dictionaries, glossaries and encyclopaedias most useful, while 22% thought that parallel texts on the Internet are also worth consulting. About 15% voted for the use of computer corpora, 13% for looking for translation solutions with the help of e-mail and forums of translators, 13% were in favour of using translation memories with similar texts, and 7% liked using mobile phones.
As evident from the pie chart on the right, about 30% of participants from 2012 regularly consult electronic dictionaries and similar resources, and 26% the Internet, making these numbers almost identical to those from 2005. A significant increase can be observed, however, in the percentage ascribed to the benefits of using various types of computer corpora, as this time 25% of respondents believed this resource is highly useful. his signifies a growing awareness on part of trainee translators of the significance played by both monolingual as well as bilingual corpora in translation work.
A - dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopaedias - in electronic form B - the Internet (parallel texts) C - corpora (monolingual, bilingual)
D - e-mail (friends, translator forums (Slovene, international))
E - TR technologies (translation memories with similar texts) F - mobile phones G - other
he two pie charts are an illustration of which translation resources trainee translators used most frequently in 2005, as shown in the pie chart on the left, compared to the situation in 2012, evident from the data provided in the pie chart on the right. he most striking difference can be observed in the use of corpora, with a significant increase from 14% in 2005 to 26% in 2012, while a serious fall in the use of e-mail and forums of translators to consult friends or professionals in a given field indicates that the frequency of use fell by half.
In 2005, 12 out of 20 students responded using CAT software was useful when translating, while in 2012, 15 out of 20 participants believed using CAT can contribute quite significantly to their translation output. Both groups of respondents were familiar with similar CAT software, the leading being the Translator's Workbench by SDL Trados. his is hardly surprising, since all trainee translators in Ljubljana are taught how to use this programme as part of their undergraduate studies. In 2012, however, several participants also reported using other CAT programmes such
20 1
15 -
10 -
5
O +
■	Translator's Workbench
□	DejaVu
■	WordFast
■	Translation Manager
□	Other
20
20 -
15 -
10 -
■	Translator's Workbench
□	Deja Vu
■	WordFast
■	STAR Transit
□	Other
Figure 8. Familiarity with CAT programmes.
as T—Stream, Across, MemoQ and Omega, which, in fact, they learnt how to use on their own. his signifies the importance ascribed to the CAT programmes and a growing awareness among the student population of the CAT software currently available on the translation market.
2005
2012
Figure 9. Frequency of using CAT programmes.
he data from 2005 and 2012 show that the frequency of using CAT programmes is on the rise; all respondents in 2012 reported using CAT programmes at least once compared to 9 out of 20 participants from 2005, who stated they had never used such translation aids, and 8 reported having used them only once, as part of their studies. In addition, 12 out of 20 trainee translators in 2012 reported having used them several times, some even regularly or frequently (as stated under other).
In 2005, 11 respondents believed the quality of their translation is influenced quite considerably by the use of electronic translation aids, while 8 stated that the use of electronic resources influenced the quality of their final product only partly. Only one participant believed that the use of electronic aids bears no influence on their translation work. In 2012, however, the attitude towards the utilization of electronic translation tools and information resources has changed; this time 19
5
0
monolingual
bilingual
respondents believed that using such tools and resources influences their translation quality quite considerably and only one respondent was not convinced that this is the case.
Since the participants from 2012 reported on their frequent use of the Internet when translating some additional questions were posed on their utilization of this source of information.15 All 20 respondents from 2012 use the Internet while translating; 16 reported they heavily rely on it all the time, while 4 stated they use it frequently when they work on their translations.
Figure 10: Familidfity with monolingrtialanel bilingti.alcorpora ^for Slo-vene-Englishi language pair in 2012.
he pie chart on the left illustrates trainee translators' familiarity with the major monolingual corpora available for Slovene and English. he responses show that almost all respondents are familiar with the most representative reference corpora for this language pair, i.e., the FidaPlus corpus for Slovene and the COCA and BNC corpora for English. he pie chart on the right illustrates which bilingual corpora available for the Slovene-English language combination have so far been encountered by trainee translators. he participants of the study are all familiar with the Evrokorpus, a large multilingual corpus of about 240 million words which consists of texts mainly gathered and translated for the purposes of the European Union documentation; 16 and 15 out of 20 trainee translators are also familiar with the ELAN and TRANS bilingual Slovene-English corpora respectively. IJS-ELAN is a one-million parallel corpus of 51 texts, while TRANS is a corpus of 41 texts from different fields (medicine, engineering, geology, tourism and legislation), created by translation students of the Faculty of Arts.16
Figure 11 is an illustration of how frequently trainee translators actually use major corpora available for the Slovene-English language pair. hey all stated that they regularly use the Evrokorpus, while 16 reported also frequently consulting the FidaPlus corpus. here were 10 out of 20 respondents who reported often looking for translation solutions also in the COCA and BNC corpora.
In addition, all 20 participants stated that they find the use of electronic resources, in particular the Internet, extremely helpful also when searching for appropriate culture-specific terms. Further details on their search strategies for culture-specific terms while translating are provided in the next section of the paper._
15	No additional data on this available for 2005.
16	TRANS was compiled in one of the translation courses at the Department of Translation Studies in Ljubljana under the supervision of Špela Vintar. More details on these two corpora can be found at http://nl.ijs/elan. Together with the SVEZ IJS Acquis, a corpus produced in the process of translating the EU legislation into Slovene, they have a joint parallel concordancer available at http://nl2.ijs.si/index—bi.html.
Figure 11. Frequency of using corpora for Slovene-English language pair in 201.
A - the Internet (parallel texts) B - corpora (monolingual, bilingual) C - e-mail (friends, translator forums (Slovene, international)) D - other
Figure 12. Appropriate solutions to culture-specific terms in 2012.
As illustrated in Figure 12, all 20 respondents again reported that the Internet is the most important source of translation solutions to culture-specific terms. hree respondents stated they look for culture-specific terms by sending a query via e-mail to their colleagues and experts in the field or to translator forums. One participant responded that they find corpus-based results most useful, while another reported using an etymology dictionary, although without specifying which one, or whether online or its paper version.
Below is a list of some strategies and approaches to searching for culture-specific terms provided by trainee translators in 2012:
■	Internet search 1 - they look for similar texts on Google to find the meaning of a particular culture-specific term, then check parallel texts of the target language websites using keywords (e.g., for gastronomy: names of dishes or ingredients in recipes known only locally; for architecture: names of objects, parts of buildings; names of holidays, customs and festivities) or they make use of the Google image search
if the term is found, trainee translators double-check the use in Google books or in online corpora,
^ if the term is not found, they usually provide a description of a given term;
■	Internet search 2 - trainee translators look for similar texts with similar content in Wikipedia:
first they search through Slovene webpages, then copy-paste the term into the target language (e. g. potica - nut roll);
■	Trainee translators make use of parallel texts on the Internet and also perform a dictionary or an encyclopaedic search (on britannica or WikipaediO); to double-check the frequency of use (and/or use of prepositions/collocations) they do newspaper search and corpus search (in Evrokorpus or COCA for example);
■	they search through the websites with the blogs of people who love to travel;
■	they make use of the Google Translate service;
■	trainee translators use another language - if they know the term in Slovene and German or Italian - they use these languages as an intermediary to find the appropriate term in English (knowing that German/Italian-English dictionaries are much more extensive compared to Slovene-English language combination);
■	they make use of the Sketch Engine;1^
■	they seek help from their colleagues, knowledgeable friends or professionals in a given field.
his clearly shows how translation practice among trainee translators has changed quite significantly even over a fairly short period of time. What used to be a regular search strategy when looking for appropriate collocation patterns in paper resources such as the BBI or images in the Oxford Pictorial Dictionary is no longer practiced. Today trainee translators make use of electronic resources exclusively. hey are heavily engaged in textual search through more - yet often also less - appropriate websites or do a Google image search.
5. Conclusion
he aim of this paper was to determine if and how translation practice among trainee translators in Slovenia has changed over the past seven years. With an ever-present increase of technological developments it is fair to assume that the nature of translation work in the future will be influenced even more heavily by technological advances. herefore the aim of our study was to explore trainee translators' awareness of the recent trends in the information and communication technologies that might enhance their translation speed and translation quality. Two questionnaires were used to gather the data on their translation practices in 2005 and in 2012. Participants in the study were members of two different generations who took the same translation courses and shared similar background knowledge on translation aids and their utilisation in translation work.
Trainee translators in general hold a highly positive view of electronic tools and information resources. Today sources of information are easily accessible, which inevitably influences translators' speed and the quality of their translating. he data obtained from both questionnaires yielded results which can also be used for further studies on translation practice as well as for pedagogical purposes.
he main diference observed from the results of the questionnaires from 2005 and 2012 is that trainee translators now tend to limit their search to the Internet exclusively; they look for translation solutions to collocations and culture-specific items on the websites rather than in the BBI or other
17 he SketchEng^line is a corpus query system incorporating word sketches, an automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour, available at http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/.
dictionaries of collocations, or in the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, for example, although this used to be a regular translation practice just a few years ago. Also rarely will they seek help in the Oxford Pictorial Dictionary or similar reference works which in the past were considered some of their primary sources of information; they now prefer searching through visual prompts found through a Google image search or even look for solutions on various blogs which might contain relevant information. A significant increase in the use of corpora can also be observed; this seems to be a positive outlook for the future, since various types of mono- bi- and multilingual corpora are an increasingly useful as well as reliable source of information showing real language usage and the necessary relevant contextual information.
Trainee translators now seem to be convinced that traditional paper resources are no longer a sufficient aid when translating. Also popular is their conviction that limited access to translation resources is restrictive while solving translation problems, and prolongs the time spent on translation. Trainee translators generally find the use of electronic aids an absolute necessity when translating, and perceive the use of electronic translation resources and translation technologies as influencing not only their speed of translating, but also the quality of their final product. Search results found on the Internet are in general taken as an absolute authority, as trainee translators seem to trust search results indiscriminately. However, the non-selective use of the Internet results may often lead to inappropriate or even wrong translation solutions. In the future, a more in-depth and selective use of translation aids needs to be addressed as part of regular translator training. It is necessary to familiarise trainee translators with sufficient skills for a successful and effective utilization of electronic translation aids and give them sufficient knowledge to make informed choices about the search results necessary for a successful intercultural communication.
I would like to thank Neža Pisanski Peterlin for her invaluable assistance and support, as well as the issue editor and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions.
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Online Resources
EMT guidelines on translation competence: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/programmes/emt/index en.htm
(last accesses June 2012) EU Translation and drafting resources for English:
http://ec.europa.eu/translation/english/english en.htm (last accesses June 2012)
EU Translation and drafting resources for Slovene: http://ec.europa.eu/translation/slovenian/slovenian en.htm (last accesses June 2012)
Additional websites for the EU terminology, esp. the IATE website: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/ publications/index en.htm (last accesses June 2012)
Dictionaries:
ASP32 (www.amebis.si) (last accesses June 2012) SSKJ http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/sski.html (last accesses June 2012) Besedišče http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/besedisc.html (last accesses June 2012) Odzadnji slovar http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/odzadnji.html (last accesses June 2012)
specialised dictionaries: http://www.gov.si/slovar (dictionary of medical terms, business dictionary, dictionary of legal terms (Longyka),
EU terminology http://www.sigov.si/evroterm (last accesses June 2012)
Corpora:
COCA + BNC rhttp://corpus.byu.edu/coca/1 (last accesses June 2012) FIDA [http://www.fida.si1 (last accesses June 2012)
Nova beseda [http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/a beseda.htmll (last accesses June 2012) ELAN + TRANS [http://nl2.ijs.si/corpus/index-bi.html1 (last accesses June 2012) EVROKORPUS [http://evrokorpus.gov.si/ (last accesses June 2012)
A collection of links to over 100 corpora [http://devoted.to/corpora (last accesses June 2012) Terminology and translation software:
TRADOS [http://www.trados.com 1 (last accesses June 2012) STAR [http://www.star-ag.ch 1 (last accesses June 2012) ATRIL's DejaVu [http://www.atril.com 1 (last accesses June 2012)