The Issue Of Equivalence In Linguistic Works
Translation is the process that renders skills, 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 boundaries 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 critical part in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so presently.
Despite such importance, science and business translation has been a topic of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-named “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 translation study, with a few notable exclusions. Such exceptions for example, regarding the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic knowledge 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 spreading them by adaptation to new traditional contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to variety of lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved by translation in turn.
As translation theory evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical factors as well. With the advent of the functionalist approach in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the center of attention, where it remains at present.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the impressive number of factors that have been investigated to date, it is fair to underline 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. Possibly one of the most overriding changes in translation 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, stopping primarily 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.
This study may well make valuable commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a role 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 strengthening of individually found skills for dealing with the myriad unpredictable sets of factors that they will definitely face in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!