The Level Of Equivalence In Translation Process
Translation is the process that renders skills, 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 borders of its primary 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, thus ultimate part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so at present.
Despite such importance, science and general 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 study, with a few serious exclusions. These exceptions for example, regarding the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic science 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 broadening them by adaptation to new national contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to lots 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 spot of attention, where it remains at present.
Although this article lacks space to even outline the great number of factors that have been checked up to date, it is fair to point out 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. Maybe one of the most overriding shifts 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, focusing 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.
Such investigation can well make necessary commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying an idea 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 development of personally adapted 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!