Machine Translation Shortcomings and Teaching Translation

Nowadays, machine translation is considered to be a frequently used tool to render various types of texts related to such different spheres as science, film industry, etc. Statement of the problem: currently, as the higher school system in Kazakhstan starts its’ integration process into world education (Kolomejceva & Makeeva, 2004), together with the re-structuring of the system itself it is a priority to translate course books and manuals from English into Kazakh and Russian and to adapt them for Kazakhstani students. A significant amount of information to be translated and the need to do it at the short notice might cause the use of machine translation tools to speed the translation process up. To clarify advantages and disadvantages of machine translation (especially for manuals and course books), the author applied such methodology as comparative analysis of the source text and its’ translated version. As a result, it is possible to state that machine translation tools are not able to replace the human translation of such complicated texts; moreover, the need of meticulous proofreading of target text is obvious as well as the urgent necessity of translation quality improvement. On the other hand, all the errors which have been observed in the target text, should be specified, categorized, and used in teaching scientific text translation to make it better. The exercises based on comparative analysis and target text proofreading can be considered as an effective tool for translators’ skills development.  The author had chosen the course book Natural Gas Processing from Midstream to Downstream by Elbashir et al. (2019) and its Russian version as a research material for pre-translation and comparative analysis and then for the target text proofreading. So the main goals of the given research consisted in (1) finding out the inappropriate cases of translation; (2) explaining the type of error and (3) preparing the exercises to prevent making such mistakes by our students in Translation Studies and, generally, to improve pre-service translators’ competencies.