The Problem Of Equivalence In Linguistic Process
Translation is the act that renders knowledge, whether literary or scientific, a mobile form of culture. Such mobility, in turn, is what gives human understanding a deep and lasting influence beyond the borders of its original setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tended to focus on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, therefore ultimate part in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and business translation has been a topic of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-called “invisibility” of the literary translator, whose efforts and worth tend to be ignored in favor of the original writer, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the field of language study, with a few important exclusions. Such exceptions for example, regarding the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic science discover an interesting truth: no less than with literary works, translators of science and medicine have often imposed new elements upon the texts they have rendered, enriching and broadening them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to many lingvas, so has this knowledge been advanced by translation in turn.
As translation science evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical causes as well. With the introducing of the functionalist approach in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the spot of attention, where it remains presently.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the impressive variety of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to say that translation studies as a spot has moved radically in the direction of embracing an integrative approach to translation that sees itself as a multidiscipline with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Perhaps one of the most overriding changes in lingvo theory has been from the static to the dynamic: from seeing the translation process as one of establishing equivalence between original and translated texts to seeing it instead as one of cognitive, social, and communicative action. Results of think-aloud studies on the mental processes involved in translation, focusing first on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a fruitful source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
Such research may seriously make necessary contributions to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying an idea for strategy and creativity training.
Partly as a result of the equivalence-to-action shift in translation theory, there is an growing awareness that translation experts must be actively engaged in the growth of personally found skills for dealing with the myriad unpredictable arrangements of factors that they will definitely meet in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!