An overview of interference in scientific and technical translation 1

In this article, I will explore the nature of in translation, especially in technical and scientific texts, using a descriptivist approach. My aim is to explain this phenomenon and its causes with all its paradoxes, instead of simply condemning it as an example of supposedly bad translation. Thus, I will focus on its status in the bibliography of translation, on the motives for and consequences of in specialised translation, as well as on the nature of the arguments given for and against this phenomenon. In an attempt to provide a wide definition for in translation, we could say that it is the importation into the target text of lexical, syntactic, cultural or structural items typical of a different semiotic system and unusual or non-existent in the target context, at least as original instances of communication in the target language. This definition includes the importation, whether intentional or not, of literal or modified foreign words and phrases (lexical interference), forms (syntactic interference), specific cultural items (cultural interference, proper nouns included), or genre conventions (structural or pragmatic interference). Interference has always been a topic of great interest in the theory of translation, although considered from different perspectives and under different labels, some of them even more value-laden than interference itself, such as contamination, code-switching, heterolingualism, linguistic influence, hybridity, borrowings, interlanguage, translationese, pidginisation, anglicisation (or whatever the source language), Spanglish, Polglish (or whatever the language pair), interpenetration or infiltration, just to mention a few. Lexical and syntactic in particular have traditionally been regarded as classic howlers, something to be systematically avoided because it worked against a fluent and transparent reading. To start with the paradoxes involved in the notion of interference, its mere presence shows that the text is a translation, refuting the illusion of sameness through an excess of similarity (cf. Humboldt 1816). From this perspective, a translation using words or syntactic structures clearly derived from the original language can not stand as a complete