The Issue Of Similarity In Language Works
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 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, therefore sensitive part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and general 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 author, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of language study, with a few important exceptions. Such exceptions for example, regarding 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 spreading them by adaptation to new traditional contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques into variety of lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved 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 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 these days.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been checked until now, it is fair to underline 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 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 primarily 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 investigation can well make necessary 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 growing awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the strengthening of individually built skills for dealing with the myriad unpredictable arrangements of factors that they will obviously pass in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!