Scientific and technical translation training in the conditions of electronic information and educational environment in the construction university
Authors: Smirnova V. N. 
Published: May 2019

Purpose of the study. Distance education is one of the possibilities for the successful realization of the didactic potential of information and communication technologies in teaching foreign languages. In the situation of transition of a higher school to a competence-oriented system of education, mastering scientific and technical translation by students of non-linguistic faculties within the framework of an electronic information and educational environment is of particular relevance. The ability to correctly interpret an authentic text testifies not only to sufficient translation training, but also the ability to use electronic educational resources based on the student’s remote access to information referral systems and teaching materials. In this regard, the purpose of this study was to determine the capabilities of remote technologies in teaching scientific and technical translation and assessing the quality of its implementation.

Materials and methods. Standardizing the definition of types of semantic distortions on the material of educational translations prepared in the framework of the electronic informational and educational environment of a building university allowed to evaluate the effectiveness of this training format, to develop guidelines for overcoming gaps in the basic interlingua training of future engineers and served as a criterion for evaluating in the process of attestation to master the discipline “Foreign language”. In the process of the study descriptive, comparative, categorical and statistical methods were used.

Results. The article describes the modular organization of the electronic information and educational environment in a building university, which implies the inclusion of several interactive platforms in its composition with an indication of their capabilities in teaching scientific and technical translation. The theoretical concepts of understanding the semantic violation in the interlingua text transformation as an unreasonable deviation from the normative requirement of meaningful correspondence of the translation to the original are presented.

Comparative analysis allowed us to identify two main categories of translation violations: (I) reducing the accuracy of the semantic content of the text and (II) distorting the semantic content of the original in the form of unjustified omission, addition and replacement. Practical assessment of violations of scientific and technical translation allowed describing the quantitative ratio of categories of errors with a predominance of semantic inaccuracies over semantic distortions, which demonstrates an increased level of formation of students’ linguistic translation competence.

Conclusion. The effectiveness of the use of electronic information-educational environment in the daily work of a construction institution has been proved, which allows improving the quality of student learning in the framework of ensuring remote synchronous and asynchronous interaction between participants in the educational process.

It was concluded that the future engineering and construction specialists need to focus on choosing the right translation solutions in the process of preparing practical tasks in the electronic information and educational environment.

The following guidelines for the effective teaching of translation in non-language faculties in higher education have been developed:

denotative correspondence of the translation of engineering and construction texts to the original at the lexical level should be associated with the selection of equivalent units of the translating language reflecting the semantics and mastery of application in the professional sphere;

the denotative correspondence of the translation of engineering and construction texts at the syntactic level, understood as the preservation of semantic accents, is determined by the study of various traditions of the communicative progression of the text in English and Russian languages and the establishment of logical links between the syntactic units of the original text;

mandatory editing of automated translation is required.