In the trend of globalization and dramatic development of science and technology, translation in general and technical translation in particular have become extremely necessary and attracted very much attention from translation theorists and researchers.
Like many developing countries in the world, in national industrialization and modernization, Vietnam needs continuously develop its mechanical engineering, one of the most important fields of science and engineering. This means it is necessary for Vietnam to improve international cooperation, translation studies and applications in mechanical engineering.
More and more inventions as well as products of mechanical engineering are made in the world. More and more new information and valuable experience in the field of mechanical engineering should be shared and exchanged in order to constantly update knowledge of such an essential field. Meanwhile, English is an international language; it is used in almost fields, in many materials, and on various media. Therefore, the English-Vietnamese translation particularly mechanical engineering term translation plays a very important role in the development of mechanical engineering.
In practice, very few English-Vietnamese Mechanical dictionaries are published in Vietnam. These dictionaries sometimes provide Vietnamese different meanings of the same English term and they can not cover all the meanings of mechanical engineering terms. This causes some difficulties for dictionary users to choose the most suitable terms. Besides, translators and researchers sometimes find it difficult to translate a number of English mechanical engineering terms into Vietnamese equivalents. The main reasons are that they do not have enough knowledge of mechanical engineering and that Vietnamese language has not had words that can express or present the meaning of some English terms exactly. In this case, they need study and choose suitable translation strategies to carry out the English-Vietnamese translation of terms in materials for mechanical engineering effectively.