The Problem Of Equivalence In Language 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 primary setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tended to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, that’s why ultimate share in its intellectual history, and continues to be so today.
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 author, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of language study, with a few serious exclusions. These exceptions for example, concerning 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 into lots of 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 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 article lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated until now, 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 cross-subject with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Perhaps one of the most overriding shifts 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 good source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This research may well make valuable contributions 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 rising awareness that translation experts must be actively engaged in the growth of personally built 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!