La localizzazione software: proposta di traduzione della documentazione di memoQ

ABSTRACT The modern world is becoming every day more and more tied to technology. The technological development of the last thirty years has led us to live in a digital world dominated by the Internet, which today reaches more than 4 billion users worldwide. Thus computers, smartphones and tablets are now part of everyday life for more and more people. Behind the worldwide spread of modern technologies we find localization, which plays a key role in our society, despite being barely known by non-experts. Every day localization enables users all around the world to access digital products and content in their own language, thus becoming essential in today’s digital world. Given the author’s interest in translation technologies, the subject of this thesis is the localization of the guide memoQ 8.7 Getting Started from English into Italian. The guide is part of the user documentation of memoQ, a software for Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) used by many professional translators. Chapter 1 starts by introducing the historical background of localization, from its origin to the consolidation of the localization industry, and then provides an overview of previous literature, focusing mainly on the process of software localization. Chapter 2 presents the localization project and all the activities carried out prior to the translation, including the analysis of the source text. The localization of the memoQ guide is the focus of Chapter 3, in which some of the most interesting aspects that emerged in the translation process are examined. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses the increasingly popular topic of Machine Translation (MT): after providing a general overview, the human translation of the memoQ guide is compared to the translation performed by the MT system DeepL.