Translator Competence Revisited in the Scenario of Digital Genre

As the translation market is becoming increasingly diversified and digital genre is gradually prevailing over paper-based media in communication, user-centred translation is high on the agenda. According to Suojanen, Koskinen and Tuominen (2015), the two important concepts behind user-centred translation are usability and user experience. Usability refers to the ease with which users can utilize a product to achieve their goals. User experience puts emphasis on the enjoyability experienced by users. While usability focuses on products being learnable or memorable, user experience is a holistic concept encompassing issues such as aesthetics, fun, and pleasure. Based on the case study of international E-commerce sites, this research reveals that translators under the new circumstances should be even more empathic than those working with paper-based media, which enables them to be versatile, adaptive, innovative and able to provide users with quality translation and enjoyable user experience.