The Issue Of Equivalence In Language Works
Translation is the activity that renders knowledge, 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 primary setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tried to focus on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, thus critical element in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so presently.
Despite such importance, science and medical 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 field of translation studies, with a few serious exceptions. Such exceptions for example, concerning 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 expanding them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques in to lots of lingvas, so has this knowledge been advanced 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 today.
Although this article lacks space to even outline the impressive number of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to say 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. Possibly one of the most overriding changes 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 positive source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This research can 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 widely engaged in the growth of individually built skills for dealing with the thousands unforeseeable combinations of factors that they will definitely came across in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!