Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

The notion that consistency is important when translating technical terms is nothing new in itself. Despite this, it is not uncommon to see the very same technical terms being translated into a multitude of words, even when various efforts to unify the process have been proposed.

This diversity in the translation of technical terms has previously been shown to occur in the medical field by analyzing equipment manuals. However, there is a lack of research on how technical term translation fares in other fields. To narrow this identified gap, quantitative overviews of the translations from the widely respected operating system Debian are presented.

The first overview is a list of the 354 most frequently appearing English technical terms. This was created by looking at the existing textual data of the system quantitatively, together with a judgment-based term selection process with the help of domain experts.

The second overview is an analysis of how the 10 most frequently used identified technical terms are translated into Japanese. This is done by Catford’s probabilistic notion of textual equivalence, which shows the different translation alternatives found in the data and the probability of their appearance.

The results of this study indicate that there is a varying degree of unification within the translation of technical terms. The synthesized data of the study can be used by the translation community to deepen educated decisions on the translation of technical terms within the field of information technology.