Technical Translation: A Translation Proposal for a Photography Guide

My objective of this thesis is to propose a technical translation from English into Italian of a photography user guide in order to highlight the main challenges a technical translator may face while translating such a complex genre of writing. The source text I have decided to translate is a section taken from David Busch’s Canon EOS 80d Guide to Digital SLR Photography and focused on photography exposure. Explaining the functions of the camera’s basic controls and relating each feature to specific photographic techniques or situations, this guide provides step by step directions to learn how to use this camera properly. My idea for this work was born from both my growing interest in translation and in digital photography, a specialised field which I have always been passionate about. First, I will give a definition of what technical translation is, explaining the difference between Scientific and Technical translation, contrasting some misconceptions about technical translation and proving its importance. In order to understand how translation theory could be useful in technical translation, I will give an overview of some of its approaches and finally, I will deal with the most important features of the technical discourse. Before proposing the actual translation, the second chapter will open with an analysis of the camera user guide, which describes the intended readers, purpose, textual organization, language and register. Subsequently, I will introduce my translation method, based on the creation of a corpus and of a glossary that were used as a reference during the translation process. My thesis concludes with a commentary on the translation: I will start from some considerations about terminology, register and textual organization, to finish with some observations about cultural specificity, in order to outline the different strategies that were adopted to face some difficulties encountered during the translation process.