The Issue Of Equivalence In Linguistic Process
Translation is the activity that renders information, whether literary or scientific, a mobile nature 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 preferred 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 share in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so these days.
Despite such importance, science and business translation has been a theme of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-called “invisibility” of the literary translator, whose labor 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 sphere of linguistic studies, with a few notable exceptions. Such exceptions for example, concerning the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic knowledge reveal 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 cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques 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 general causes as well. With the introducing of the functionalist vision in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the spot of attention, where it remains today.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to stress that translation studies as a field has moved radically in the direction of embracing an integrative approach to translation that sees itself as a cross-subject 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 first on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a positive source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
Such study may well make necessary commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a role for strategy and creativity exercises.
Partly as a result of the equivalence-to-action shift in translation theory, there is an growing awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the strengthening of individually adapted skills for dealing with the endless number unforeseeable sets of factors that they will obviously came across in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!