Abstract:

To become competitive on a labor market any prospective specialist in translation needs to obtain skills of working with flood of information that nowadays changes too fast, ability to solve professional issues with the help of modern informative-communicative technologies. It results in necessity for teachers to develop competency in informative-communicative technologies among students specializing in translation. To develop this kind of competency, one needs to have firstly: general computer literacy, secondly: literacy in IT-technologies and thirdly: information culture. Experience of working with students and survey carried out among first-year students showed that when it comes to the first point, general computer literacy, it is not a problem, as most students are really computer literate, but at the same time we revealed that they know little, if nothing, about modern IT-technologies that can be used to optimize work of a translator, i.e. illiterate in specialized IT technologies, and don’t have enough skills to properly interpret and navigate the flood of information in modern media, especially in the Internet, i.e have a low level of information culture. So the issue, that teachers of foreign languages for professional communication and teachers of translation for professional purposes face nowadays, is to explain students the advantages of using IT-technologies while translating. The article gives an overview of these advantages. Another issue is to provide students with all necessary and relevant information about up-to-date IT-technologies, that can be used in process of translation and to form skills, that are necessary to use them properly in a translation process. To address and solve above-mentioned issues, we developed specialized course “IT-technologies in specialized translation” and teaching methods to develop IT competency among our students specializing in translation. Within the course students get comprehensive information and practice skills to use following IT-technologies:
1) e-dictionaries (Multitran, Multilex, Cambridge on-line dictionary, Oxford on-line dictionary, Longman on-line dictionary, CobuildCollins etc.),
2) machine translation (Google translation, Yandex translator, PROMT, Pragma etc,)
3) systems of automatized translation based on Translation Memory (TRADOS, Déjà vu).

In the article we describe teaching methods used in classes delivering this course. After completing the course students demonstrated higher quality of translation and ability to translate lager volumes of texts at shorter time than without doing the course. These results, on the one hand, prove the necessity and efficiency of such a course for prospective specialists in translation and, on the other hand, encourage teachers to constantly update the course content to be in line with the most innovative technologies in the field of translation. Moreover, such type of IT-technologies as Internet, being a new environment of information existence, gives an additional drive for translation skills development. Prospective translator should take into account the advent of independent area in translation practice as translation and localization of web-sites. This market segment is booming and a competitive translator in professional communication has to acquire skills of working with this IT-technology. It sets a serious objective before those who teach translators which needs further and proper consideration.

Keywords:

IT-technologies, IT-competency, general computer literacy, information culture, specialized translation.