Leveraging VBA in translation
The article is focused on finding ways for the VBA application in translation. Most of the macro code solutions available online date back to the early 2000s. Given the fact, the researchers decided to look into the usefulness of the instrument in today's environment, which has changed significantly over the two decades. No matter how elaborate modern translating tools are, MS Word is still there, and time and again translators turn to it to convey various ideas to another language. Most specialists make do with what the designer built into the word processor, but there is a Developer tab they fail to notice. This is an opening, deliberately left by the developers to let users tap into the program and adjust it as needed. The authors go consistently from the analysis of existing codes, to writing their own based on the needs of today’s translators and eventually to suggesting approaches for harnessing the tool to the translators’ benefit. The ultimate proof of the value of translation-tailored VBA macros comes in the form of an experiment, built around the problem of converting measuring units in technical texts, a major translation challenge, particularly in the English-Russian pair of languages. The application of the code resulted in faster and more accurate calculations during the conversions, let alone better quality of the translated text. Not least important is that the translators now could focus on conveying the sense and idea, instead of switching between the MS Word window and numerous online/offline dictionaries, converters, corpora, etc., interrupting the string of their thoughts every time they came across numbers. This alone justifies taking the translator out of the loop when it comes to standard processes. Other noteworthy results include: 1) list of tasks where macro solutions will relieve translators of extra workload, causing premature fatigue and degrading performance; 2) on-the-job path for consistent and gradual mastering of the tool, encompassing copying, modification, and combination of existing macros; 3) prove of the precedence of the code logic over its form and role of strategies in the use of macros.
Gruzdev D. Yu., Dyomochkina V. V., Makarenko A. S. (2021). Leveraging VBA in translation. Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, V.7 (4), 66-81, DOI: 10.18413/2313-8912-2021-7-4-0-6
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