The Issue Of Equivalence In Linguistic Process
Translation is the activity 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 boundaries of its primary setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tried to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, thus sensitive part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so these days.
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 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 field of linguistic studies, with a few serious exclusions. Such 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 national contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge into variety of languages, 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 factors 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 opinion lacks space to even outline the impressive variety of factors that have been checked until now, it is fair to stress that translation studies as a focus 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. Maybe one of the most overriding changes in languages 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.
This research may seriously make necessary contributions 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 development of individually found skills for dealing with the thousands unforeseeable arrangements of factors that they will obviously face in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!